LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

%p. ©njt^rig]^ :|ij 

Slielft..S.{o.3©7 

^^-3 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



ORTHODOX THEOLOGY OF TO-DAY 



BY / 

NEWMAN SMYTH 

AUTHOB OP "the BELIGIOUS PEELING" AND " OLD PAITHS IN NEW LIGHT'* 



NEW EDITION 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1883 






COPYEIGHT, 1881, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Copyright, 1883, by 
CHARLES SORIBNER'S SONS 



Trow's 

Pmntinq and Bookbinding Comfaitt 

201-213 East 12th Street 

NEW YOBS 







PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 



In* preparing a revised edition of these dis- 
courses for the press, I owe it first to myself to 
review them in such further light as may have 
come to me from recent discussions of some of 
the subjects with which this volume is con- 
cerned ; and I owe it, also, to my readers to 
notice criticism upon my views, so far as it may 
help me to put my own purpose and thought 
in their right relation to existing beliefs and 
movements. 

As indicated in the preface to the first edition, 
this book had its origin in the practical necessi- 
ties of an evangelical pulpit, in which I found 
myself called to represent evangelical religion 
in the midst of much unbelief and denial of the 
distinctive doctrines of Christianity. With the 
exception of the closing sermon tliey were un- 
written discourses, and owe their first appear- 
ance in print to the presence of a short-hand 



IV PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

reporter. Their object and aim necessarily de- 
termined their oral style, which I have not en- 
deavored to change in their present publication, 
and also their apologetic method, for the princi- 
ples and tendencies of which, with its legitimate 
dogmatic inferences, I should properly be held 
responsible by my brethren. 

The title under which I chose to gather 
these discom^ses does imply my conviction that 
the best defence of orthodox theology involves 
to some extent its dogmatic reconstruction. 
Since this volume first saw the light, a new 
movement within orthodox circles has become 
more generally recognized, and, I may add, some 
who felt the first stirrings of the new spirit are 
growing more deeply conscious of its promise 
and power. To identify, however, as some have 
seemed inclined to do, this general religious 
movement with any question about proba.tion, 
or to imagine that its volume and sweep can be 
measured by its incidental effects upon some 
special dogma, is utterly to misunderstand its 
real scope and force. It has varied and deep 
sources in our present Christian life and thought, 
and there are many evangelical scholars in full 
sympathy with its main principles and tenden- 
cies who are far from agreeing with regard to 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, v 

not a few particular points of doctrine. For 
there are certain controlling and constructive 
principles whicli are now coming to be clearly 
understood among Christian scholars, whose 
doctrinal beliefs, nevertheless-, may present 
wide divergencies. To these general principles 
of the '' new theology," if it may be as yet 
so called, I have endeavored to be true in my 
own discussion of the questions which I had 
to meet in these sermons, A few words, then, 
with reference to these constructive principles 
may prove helpful to any who would under- 
stand aright present distinctive theological ten- 
dencies. 

The distinction just indicated between princi- 
ples of doctrine, and dogmas, is a real and im- 
portant distinction, though it is one too often 
overlooked in theological criticism. Men may 
accept, and even hotly contend for, identical 
dogmas of belief, who may nevertheless stand 
wide apart in the principles of their faith. 
On the other hand, men who stand whole 
denominational diameters asunder, may have 
much in common in the formative forces and 
real affinities of their thou^-bts and beliefs. 
That is always a superficial, and usually a mis- 
leading, method of criticism which begins with 



VI PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

definitions and stops with dogmatic summaries, 
and does not penetrate into tlie. heart and motive 
power of a religious movement or a theological 
tendency. Moreover, it makes a vast difference 
whether some dogma simply refuses to grow 
definite and concrete to honest religious think- 
ing, or some doctrine of faith runs soon into in- 
definiteness upon the horizon of knowledge, or 
whether the guiding and formative principles of 
one's relicrious life and thouo;ht have never been 
clearly recognized and firmly grasped ; — the 
former may be a theological virtue, as it is a 
frequent biblical characteristic ; the latter may 
be the theological vice even of the most pro- 
nounced and positive dogmatists. 

One may hardly hope to communicate by 
general statements any very adequate idea of 
living principles to those who have no prepara- 
tion, through their own struggles and experience, 
for their sympathetic reception and understand- 
ing. Seed-principles of thought — constructive 
potencies of new developments — always need 
time and patience for their perfect work. It is 
the more gratifying, therefore, as it is deeply 
significant of a work of the Spirit of truth, that 
amid the diversity of denominations and of 
dogmas there is coming to pass so much unity 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. vu 

in regard to fundamental and formative princi- 
ples of Christian thought. 

I will venture the follov^ng partial enumera- 
tion of principles w^hich, as it seems to me, are 
becoming more generally recognized among 
Christian scholars, and v^hich are destined to 
prove themselves more determinative powers in 
the immediate future of Christian theology. 

First — A personal and ethical conception of 
religion. The ultimate religious relation is not 
one of law, or even of childhood and paternity, 
but it is the relation of a finite moral being to 
the perfect and entire moral personality of 
God. This conception of religion leads us be- 
hind the maxims, and above the plane of rea- 
soning, of whole systems of theology. 

Second. — Historical and scientific interpreta- 
tion of the Scriptures. The Scriptures are now 
searched through their historical perspective, 
and the new theology seeks to develop t\\e prin- 
ciples of the Bible. This is a hopeful improve- 
ment over the unhistorical and speculative use 
of texts, which has been the crying fault of the 
traditional Protestant theologies. 

Third. — A more careful recoo-nition of the 
limits of knowledge, and the varying distances 
down which the light of revelation shades into 



viii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

indistinctness, and, at length, into mystery. 
The need and use of the observance of this 
principle is illustrated by the distinctions which 
careful modern theologians are accustomed 
to make between the facts of revelation, and 
the doctrines of the Bible, or those facts in 
their rational apprehension; and the dogmas 
of theology, or the doctrines in their system- 
atic definition and co-ordination ; and Christian 
opinions, speculations, or hopes, which it is 
permissible for believers to entertain, and 
which in some relations may prove helpful to 
faith, but which we cannot confidently teach as 
dogmas, or preach as doctrines, or confound 
with the facts of Christianity in their essential 
principles. It is a sad misunderstanding, and a 
railing accusation deserving of severe censure, 
when those who are careful to make and to ob- 
serve such distinctions are charged with con- 
cealing their real beliefs, or with entertaining a 
Jesuitical distinction between their private opin- 
ions and their public beliefs, and with denomina- 
tional dishonesty. They, at least, are not usually 
responsible for that suspicious ecclesiasticism 
which puts its narrow determinations of what 
the Scriptures must mean before the weaker 
brethren as possible temptations to doctrinal 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. ix 

concealments. The principle should be admitted 
and used which requires the truthful observa- 
tion of the lights and shadows of revelation, of 
the varying degrees, at different distances and 
depths of truth, of biblical clearness and bibli- 
cal indefiniteness. Next to the hazard and harm 
to faith of a creed composed entirely with '' if s," 
would be a theology without '^ ifs." 

Fourth. — A Christian idea of God as the 
regulative principle of Christian theology. In 
all our religious thinking, if we would not suf- 
fer our own logic to lead us far from the truth, 
we must look up repeatedly from our work into 
the face of the most pure Christian idea of God 
which we can behold revealed through the 
Christian conscience and the Christian heart. 
For an example and helpful illustration of the 
service which this habit of mind has to render 
to theology, I might refer to Professor Dorner's 
'' System of the Doctrine of Christian Faith." 
The principle is capable of still further and 
higher service in theology. 

Fifth, — A profound conviction that God con- 
ducts his universe upon Christian princi])les, 
and that he will deal with every soul of man 
finally and forever only upon the most thor- 
oughly Christian principles. God will be not 



X PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

only the Almighty, not only Jehovah, but also 
Christ, toward every soul of man. 

Sixth. — A. thorough conception of the abso- 
luteness and moral universality of Christianity. 
This principle is involved in that last men- 
tioned; but it deserves distinct and emphatic 
mention as one of the most powerful and influ- 
ential principles of modern religious thought. 
It has its roots in the New England principles 
of individual responsibility and universal atone- 
ment, as well as in the profounder German phil- 
osophy of faith and redemption. This is a 
Christian world — made for the central fact and 
power of Christianity, as well as for the tem- 
porary history of sin ; God is a Christian 
Being, and the consummation of the world-ages 
is to be a Christian judgment. I will not at- 
tempt here to indicate the immense reach, and 
the reconstructive potency of this principle, or 
perhaps I should say rather, in justice to the 
older theologies, of the clear, unhesitating, and 
consistent recognition and use of this principle. 
But I should own in this introduction that I 
have come myself to a better and firmer under- 

11 standing of this principle than I had gained 

when these sermons were first delivered, and I 

11 would now bring out more positively this truth, 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. xi 

which underlies and pervades the sermons in 
this volume upon the future life. I would 
preach with decision the doctrine of a Christian 
judgment for all souls — a Christian judgment 
to occur in the divine development of history 
after the last of the world-ages, viz., this pres- 
ent dispensation of the Holy Ghost, this day of 
salvation, which, as the words of the Apostle 
teach, is the accepted time for the Gentiles ; — 
words of inspiration too often dwarfed in the 
application of them merely to the lifetime of 
individuals, instead of to this whole present 
dispensation of the Spirit, behind which are the 
preparatory ages of the law and the natural 
conscience, and beyond which is the consumma- 
tion and the last Christian judgment. I would 
teach this biblical doctrine of a Christian judg- 
ment for all souls, and of the possibility of final 
condemnation by a Christian God only for the 
definitive and decisive sin against the Holy 
Ghost, which can be incurred only in that age of a 
soul's existence after Christ has been born for it, 
and offered as the Redeemer ; I would not dog- 
matize — I may think and hope — concerning the 
possible ways in which the God of light shall 
bring all, in his own time, to the real justice and 
perfect righteousness of the Christian judgment. 



Xll PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

Besides these general statements, a few words 
with regard to each of these sermons may serve 
to correct misapprehension, and to help others 
to read them in the light of those principles in 
which I would have them judged. At the 
threshold of my argument with popular un- 
belief, I found the usual objection raised against 
the creeds of the churches. I could not defend 
church-creeds in their historic worth and sig- 
nificance, without at the same time admitting 
the frequent need of their reconsideration, and 
claiming that loyalty to their real purpose and 
spirit may often require their modification and 
renewal by those who have inherited them. 
Those who represent the new movement in 
theology, so far as I am aware, do not regard 
themselves as sent to destroy the creeds of the 
churches, but to fulfil them ; and they are hon- 
estly endeavoring to fill the old forms full, even 
to breaking, if need be, with fresh faith in 
divine truth, and larger interpretations of God's 
.word. 

The second discourse points toward that 
higher Christian conception of God, in the light 
of which the doctrine of the atonement espe- 
cially needs to receive new and more ethically 
thorough discussion than has been possible 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, xiii 

either under the federal or governmental meth- 
ods of the Princeton which is, and the Andover 
that was. If, however, it is the pride of the 
former that it abides by its sound traditions, it 
is the glory of the latter that the development 
of its own best principles breaks the shell of 
the provincialism which first sheltered them, 
and bears the promise of a richer and riper, and 
more catholic, Christian theology. 

In the following sermon upon ^' Forgiveness 
and Suffering," I took pains to say, in my con- 
sciousness of the inadequacy of a single dis- 
course to do justice to so manifold a theme, 
that I was presenting ^' but one aspect of the 
atoning work of Christ" (p. 79), a qualification 
which some of my critics seem to have entirely 
overlooked. I added in a note a sketch, or out- 
line, of the relations of the view presented to 
other aspects of the subject — a note which I 
regret that those who have condemned the ser- 
mon as " wanting in thoroughness," or as giving 
up " the vicariousness of the atonement," seem 
generally not to have observed. I may fairly 
be asked to show that the point of view whicli 
I have chosen for the survey of the system of 
redemption is the highest Christian point of 
view, from which the most comprehensive and 



XIV PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, 

broadest prospect of its great range and mani- 
fold relations is to be gained, thougli I should 
wish to acknowledge more worshipfully with 
every ascent of thought, the incompleteness and 
limitations of our largest knowledge of the 
length and breadth of God's purpose of redemp- 
tion in Christ. The following additional ques- 
tions and statements may serve to make clearer 
my favorite point of view, and prove helpful to 
a more thorough discussion of this great subject 
than is possible upon the plane of the current 
political and governmental treatment of this 
divine mystery of love. First, Can there be any 
deeper source for our theology of the atonement 
than the text of the sermon upon '^ Forgiveness 
and Suffering " in this volume ? Is anything 
deeper than the love of God ? Secondly, Can 
we hope to gain any more comprehensive view 
of the history of redemption than we may reach 
from the pure height of Christ's own view of 
it, God so loved the world ? Thirdly, Is not 
the most thorough work now needed for New 
England theology in general, and with regard 
to the doctrine of the atonement in particular, 
a spiritual endeavor to overcome the rational- 
ism of its methods, and to return to the deep 
religious simplicity and moral truth of the Gos- 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, xv 

pel of Jesus Christ? And, with these ques- 
tions, I would leave also the following sugges- 
tions of what I regard the more thorough work 
which needs to be patiently thought out upon 
the doctrine of the atonement. 

First — The study of this doctrine, with more 
moral profoundness, in and through the Chris- 
tian experience and consciousness of forgiveness 
in human relations. The moral principles of 
forgiveness must be the same everywhere — on 
earth and in heaven. 

Second. — The clear and constant recognition, 
particularly in our thought of the atonement, 
of the moral unity of God. The moral attri- 
butes of our logical definitions are not to be 
treated as though they possessed ontological real- 
ity, and might even be eternally opposing dis- 
tinctions of justice and mercy in the moral being 
of the Deity. The tendency of New England 
theology to run at every point into sharp verbal 
distinctions, has endangered in its discussions 
the moral realism of the Godhead. We need 
to see the Cross of Christ as it stands Id its 
place from eternity in the real righteousness of 
God's love. 

Third. — An abandonment alike of the so- 
called paternal and governmental and juridical 



XVI PREFACE TO THE AEJV EDITION, 

ideas of the ultimate relation of God to sinful 
man, and the endeavor to abide by the pro- 
founder and final biblical conception of God as 
the living God, related directly and personally, 
in the wholeness of his perfect moral being, to 
man and the history of man. The ultimate 
questions — profounder moral Cjuestions than 
have usuallv entered into the theoloo-ical dis- 
cussions of the atonement in this country — ^per- 
tain not to the relations of the Law and the 
Gospel, nor to the rec^uirements and possible 
satisfactions of provisional and preparatory dis- 
pensations of history, but concern directly and 
supremely the self-satisfaction of God, in his 
perfect moral unity, in his dealings ^vith his 
sinful creatures, — or, in other words, the last 
question is the incjuiry of Christian ethics, What 
is worthy of God \ AVhat does God owe as the 
highest and one comj)rehensive obligation to 
himself ? 

With these suggestions I leave this portion 
of this book unaltered, cherishing the hope that 
at some future time I may be permitted to 
set forth in ''full expansion" a view of the 
atonement which seems to me to go deep as 
our thought of love, and the essential righteous- 
ness of love, and which I believe, therefore, 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. xvii 

will be found comprehensive of God's historical 
relations and dealings with man in his sinful- 
ness, and conservative of those truths of the 
Christian consciousness of forgiveness, and the 
real vicariousness of the cross, and God's self- 
satisfaction in our justification through Christ, 
which orthodoxy has ever maintained. 

The sermons upon the future life I have seen 
no reason materially to change. The passage 
concerning the relation of the next life to time 
I did not suppose would be misconstrued by 
any person at all familiar with modern meta- 
physics, as a denial of the intuition of the 
eternal, or an assertion that the future life 
has no relation to duration. Those who are 
familiar with John Foster's celebrated letter 
upon the duration of future punishment, and 
with the darkness of soul into which he was 
plunged by the effort to think out the idea of 
the eternal under the form of multiplied mathe- 
matical measurements of time, will need no 
further explanation of my refusal to seek to de- 
fine the intuition of eternity in finite terms of 
duration. The leap from finite and tempoi'al 
quantities and periods to the infinite and the 
eternal, is one wliich, as a metaphysician, I can- 
not make ; and the knowledge of my inability 



xviii PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

to conceive of the infinite, and of the worthless- 
ness of all attempts to conceive of it, I find use- 
ful as a theologian in determining the limits 
beyond which I am not competent to understand 
the eternal life and its retributions. 

For readers not versed in metaphysics it may 
be well for me to explain, what seems to me 
obvious from my words in their own connec- 
tions, that the word eternal, like the word 
infinite, stands for the positive intuition of a 
kind or order of existence of which we have no 
experience, and can form no definite idea ; that 
the words endless time and everlastinoj dura- 
tion are simply common, but vain, attempts to 
bring under the forms of our experience, and so 
to understand, realities which are beyond our 
finite knowledge ; these phrases, when thought 
out, involve the contradiction of a limited, 
unlimited time, or an immeasurable length of 
measurable periods of duration. I have sim- 
ply availed myself as a Christian believer of 
this limitation of philosophic thought, when 
pressed by religious difficulties arising from 
temporal imaginations of the future life in its 
eternity. I claim that this is a proper use of 
Bishop Butler's principle of reasoning from the 
analogy of nature in the presence of many re- 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION, xix 

liofious difficulties. In other words, tliere are 
difficulties in conceiving both eternal life and 
eternal punishment which cannot be fully re- 
solved until we shall know what the time-meas- 
ure of our immortality may be, or what shall be 
the relation to eternity of our life when this 
world-time shall have come to an end. after the 
last day of judgment. It will be observed, how- 
ever, that I have not sought refuge in metaphys- 
ics from any of the moral difficulties of the 
biblical teachings concerning the future life, but 
only from the temporal imaginations and multi- 
plication-tables of divines whose zeal has led 
them to speak beyond knowledge, and to bind 
upon Jesus' solemn words to the conscience of 
man meanings which repel conscience, and witli 
which Jesus never perplexed and confused us. 

From some moral difficulties, which grow 
upon us almost in proportion with our increase 
in knowledge of the Christian God, I sug- 
gested that relief might possibly be found by 
paying more attention to the biblical hints con- 
cerning the intermediate life. This docti'ine 
belongs to the history of orthodox theology ; it 
has been largely restored in the evangelical 
teaching of Germany; it cannot, in my judg- 
ment, be allowed to drop out fi'om our theo- 



XX PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

logical training without danger to the whole 
orthodox conception of the future life. Al- 
ready the tendency is full strong enough to 
make the resurrection and the judgment follow 
immediately or soon after death ; and, by an 
unscriptural exaggeration of the place and 
power of death in the divine order of salvation, 
to empty of real meaning Christ's words concern- 
ing his second coming and the last judgment. 
This tendency coincides with the extreme indi- 
vidualism of the American mind ; and the bib- 
lical conceptions of the organic relations of 
men, and the unitv and final consummation of 
the whole creation, have been falling out from 
our theology. One of the practical gains to be 
hoped from the renewed discussion of the limits 
of probation and the doctrine of the interme- 
diate life, will be the restoration of the doc- 
trines of the resurrection and the last judgment 
to a more assured place in our theology, and to 
greater practical power in our preaching. 

I wish to acknowledge the sympathetic and 
kindly criticism which this attempt to defend 
constructively certain essential truths of faith 
has received from many, and sometimes unex- 
pected, quarters. Happily the feudal age of 
theological controversy is fast passing away. 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. xxi 

Neither our churches nor our theoloo:ical sem- 
inaries resemble now, so much as once seemed 
necessary, armed castles of feudal knights ; 
occasionally one armed with the sword may 
strive for mastery in the denominational press 
or upon the platform ; but of such the Scrip- 
ture is usually fulfilled before us, ^'All they 
that take the sword shall perish with the 
sword." Providentially the battles which now 
we are called upon to wage with all our might, 
are not against our brethren, or with single lance 
and spear ; but in tlie unity of Christian love, 
and through the grand benevolent, and mission- 
ary combinations of the Christian world, we are 
contending against the irreligion and sin and 
suffering of mankind. The best scholarship of 
Christianity is now far beyond the feudal age 
of Protestant theology, moving steadily on 
toward a purer catholicity than Cyprian con- 
ceived and Rome realized; and the Christian 
lieart of the people, by the instincts of faith, 
demands liberty and loves peace. 

New Haven, Conn., March 8, 1883. 



PREFACE. 



These discourses were originally prepared in 
answer to certain objections which had been 
urged against evangelical teaching in the col- 
umns of a local newspaper in my own home, and 
which are often raised, in various forms, as dif- 
ficulties in the way of the popular acceptance 
of the doctrines of the churches. They are 
now printed substantially as they were first de- 
livered, as, in consenting to their publication, I 
have felt that the attempt to meet an expressed 
want in any one locality might prove the most 
hopeful fidelity to a real need of the larger 
public to which these discussions of some vital 
questions of Christian thought are now ad- 
dressed. 

Though they were in form a reply to mis- 
conceptions and o])jections urged upon the at- 
tention of the pulpit in belialf of popular 



XXIV PREFACE. 

scepticism, I trust that their spirit may not be 
found to be controversial. I have sono-ht rather 
to avail myself of admitted difficulties and com- 
mon perplexities concerning the doctrines of the 
churches, as a background upon which I would 
bring out the hopeful convictions and assured 
beliefs of those evangelical scholars with whom 
I find myself to be most in sympathy, and who, 
as it seems to me, are giving the simplest form, 
and the truest expression, to Christian theology 
at the present time. The positions and views 
of these Christian thinkers of to-day can hardly 
be measured or defined by any traditional lines 
of division, or by theological names derived 
from the past. The more recent phrases of 
ecclesiastical sepai'ation, ^' Old School " and 
•' New School," represent to them issues of yes- 
terday rather than of to-day ; and the definitions 
and phraseology which some v>'ho still stand 
marking time in those old ways are careful to 
maintain, seem to them utterly inadequate de- 
terminations of the advanced line of Christian 
reasoning and belief which they are compelled 
to occupy, as they seek to face the great ques- 



PREFACE, XXV 

tions with which faith is now confronted. They 
do not stoop down and watch anxiously lest 
the ^^foundations" be shaken; but, knowing 
that God's words cannot pass away, they are 
eager to look up and face present responsibil- 
ities of Christian thought, and to catch what 
revelations of truth may be dawning upon the 
horizons of to-day. 

While, thus, in common with an increasing 
number of Christian thinkers I must disclaim the 
terms, and decline myself to be classified by the 
nomenclature of the schools, I would still retain 
and use as descriptive of a reverent, but pro- 
gressive, Christian theology the old word ortho- 
doxy, especially since a distinction of no little 
present importance is coming to be made, and 
needs to be emphasized, between orthodoxy and 
orthodoxism. By orthodoxy I Avould mean the 
continuous historical development of the doc- 
trine of Jesus and his apostles ; and the ortho- 
dox habit or temper of mind I would consider 
to be simply fidelity to the teachings of the 
Spirit of Truth throughout Christian history, 
as tlie things of Christ have l)een witnessed to 



XXVI 



PRE FA CE. 



the cliurcli in its great confessions, and as the 
words of the Lord are still opening their mean- 
ings, under new providential lights, in the en- 
larg^ing: thousrht of the Christian world. Or- 
thodoxism, on the other hand, is the dogmatic 
stagnation and ecclesiastical abuse of ortho- 
doxy. Orthodoxism is an orthodoxy which has 
ceased to grow — a dried and brittle orthodoxy. 
Orthodoxism offers a crust of dogma kept over 
from another century; it fails to receive the 
daily bread for which we are taught this day 
to pray. It has been my desire, therefore, 
throughout these discourses, to represent, so 
truthfully as I may, the orthodox spirit and be- 
lief — only not the orthodoxy of yesterday, but 
of to-day. 

It should be remembered that the first of these 
discourses was intended for the relief of a popu- 
lar prejudice against all creeds, and the reasoning 
pursued should be judged with reference to the 
object which I had immediately in view; if I 
had been called to address upon the same topic 
an ecclesiastical assembly, my growing convic- 
tion of our need of a revised theology, suited to 



PREFACE, xxvii 

our scientific environment, and fitted to survive 
in modern thought, would have led me to lay 
the stress of my argument even more strongly 
upon the desirability of a restatement of the 
standards, particularly of my own, the Presby- 
terian church; and the conservatism usually 
audible in such assemblies would have relieved 
me from the necessity of pleading that justice 
be done the old and hallowed forms of faith, 
while urging timely preparation for the coming 
of another of the days of the Son of man. 

The view of the Atonement which is sug- 
gested in the third discourse seems to me to be 
in harmony with the truth of Christ seen and 
welcomed by many minds who have been awak- 
ened, by the touch of Dr. Bushnell's magic 
thought, to simpler and more purely moral con- 
ceptions of the work of Christ; while, at the 
same time, the Cross is regarded as in some real 
sense necessary for the self-satisfaction of God's 
own nature in forgiving sin ; and therefore I 
shall not, I trust, be foimd to liave missed 
wholly the truth hidden in the heart of the 
older, sacrificial theology. 



xxviii PREFACE, 

My dealing with current objections of popu- 
lar scepticism would have been singularly in- 
complete without some endeavor, at least, on 
my part to wi'estle with the acknowledged dif- 
ficulties of our belief in a future life of rewards 
and punishments. My reasonings and conclu- 
sions upon these momentous questions may seem 
to some too cautious and hesitating; others 
whose minds are darkened under the shadow 
of the awful possibilities of the retributive 
government of God, may possibly be helped 
by them to wait and trust ; I can only say of 
them that I have gone as far as 1 think reason 
and the Scripture allow us to go with unhesi- 
tating feet, and I have stopped, and am waiting 
for more light, where a step farther would 
seem to me to be a step beyond the limits of 
revelation — a doubtful leap which orthodox 
theology should not push faith to take in the 
dark. 

To the discussion of the doctrine of the 
future life I have added a sermon upon Social 
Immortality, without which one chief element 
of the hope of immortality would have been 



PREFACE. xxix 

left nntouclied. It may, also, help to swell the 
needed and growing reaction against that exag- 
gerated and extreme individualism which has 
been at once the strength and the weakness of 
Protestantism, both the truth and the sophism 
of Calvinistic philosophy. 

A few critical notes have been appended, in 
order to indicate more definitely, at some im- 
portant points, the relation of positions assumed 
in. the discourses to existing questions and be- 
liefs. 

These discourses, without further preface, I 
would introduce simply as one series of a pas- 
tor's working sermons ; they are not sent forth 
under " the philosopher's cloak," but clothed in 
the working-dress of the ordinary ministration 
of the "Word, and for the purpose of helping 
among men the removal of some common diffi- 
culties in the way of the coming of a better 
day of faith. 

QuiNCY, III., June, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

The Churches and Creeds, 13 

n. 

Dobs Orthodoxy Misunderstand God? • . . .88 

III. 
Forgiveness and Suffering, 61 

IV. 

Imperfect Theories of the Future Life, ... 83 

Y. 

Negative and Positive Elements in the Conception 
of the Future Life, 108 

vi. 

Social Immortality, 189 

APPENDIX, . . . . r 168 



DISCOURSES. 



THE CHUECHES AND CREEDS. 



Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by 
the same rule, let us mind the same thing. — Phil. iii. 16. 



We are told that the creeds of the churches 
are obstacles in the way of Christianity. If 
the doctrines upon which, as it is often, but in- 
correctly said, the churches are founded, should 
be removed, men would flock into them, and 
they would be filled to overflowing. But 
though in not a few churches creeds have been 
taken out of the way, the logic of facts has 
hardly justified the expectations of those Avho 
would banish them, and in no creedless churcli 
has Christianity come to its kingdom. I would 
not form a generalization from isohited facts, 




14 DISCOURSES. 

but the whole history of the church seems to 
show that the flow" and power of a progressive 
Christianity has kept within certain general 
limits of belief, and that, too far beyond those 
limits, both churches and individuals lose the 
deep, strong current of the divine influence in 
human history. The repeated failures of at- 
tempts to build churches upon a basis of pure 
individualism, and the incontestable fact that 
Christianity has made steady progress along the 
lines of certain common beliefs and historical 
confessions, are reasons sufficient, at least, to 
prevent us from dismissing these creeds with 
an impatient gesture, as though we had only to 
bow them out in order to bow the world into 
the church. 

I have spent many delightful hours of my 
life in the woods, but I have never seen a tree 
that had grown up through the storms — I have 
never noticed a single living twig — which nature 
had not provided with a covering of bark. A 
creedless church is like a barkless tree. The 
bark, it is true, should grow with the growth 
of the tree ; but some bark seems to be a neces- 
sity of growth. Some creed is essential to the 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 15 

development of Christianity. I have looked 
down through the microscope into the first be- 
ginnings of life, and seen at the very bottom of 
all existence a mass of protoplasmic pulp ; but 
the cell which is the unit of growth, the unit of 
the forming tissues, is a nucleus of life pro- 
tected by an envelope, or wall, of formed mat- 
ter. This analogy of natural growth will hardly 
mislead us in the higher spheres of mind and 
morals. Some formed matter, some fixed beliefs, 
would seem to be necessities of the growth of 
religion. Some creed — I am not speaking just 
now of its contents — is necessary to the men- 
tal growth of individuals. Christianity would 
be singularly incomplete did it not furnish 
materials for reason to fashion into systems 
of thought ; and the intellectual completeness 
of Christianity has been to many profound 
intellects one of the evidences of its divine 
origin. 

Some creed, moreover, some fixed idea of con- 
duct, is necessary to the growth of character. 
We are not beyond the wisdom of the proverb, 
"As he thinketh in his heart" — that is, as a 
man really believes — ^^ so is he." 



1 6 DISCOURSES. 

Some creed is still more a social necessity, 
essential to the existence and perpetuity of the 
new society which it is the distinctive glory of 
Christianity to have called forth. Jesus came 
preaching the kingdom of God. His object 
from the first was not simply to call the indi- 
vidual disciple to follow him, but to create an 
apostolic fellowship ; not merely to save the in- 
dividual soul, but to save it for a society of the 
redeemed. The new, higher society created in 
this world by Jesus, affords, by its existence 
and perpetuity, one of the distinctive and char- 
acteristic evidences of his supernatural virtue, 
Christianity issues, as no other religion so na- 
turally and so powerfull}^, in a church. But 
this new society is and must be a fellowship in 
the truth. The doctrine of Jesus, therefore, as 
it was received by the apostles, and as it opens 
its manifold meanings with the growth of Chris- 
tian thought, is not only to be regarded as an 
essential part of Christianity, but also as one of 
its first social necessities. 

Most men, therefore, may agree with me that 
some creed is a necessity required by the very 
nature of mind and morals, and indispensable 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 



17 



to the upbuilding of a higlier Christian society. 
Their objections to creeds, however, really lie 
ao:ainst their contents or their abuses. I shall 
refer, therefore, to several objections of this 
description against our present forms or admin- 
istration of Christianity. I v^^ould not, how- 
ever, take up these objections in any spirit of 
controversy, for I have noticed that when men 
begin to debate, truth usually begins to suffer ; 
but there are doubts and difficulties concern- 
ing our creeds which sometimes find expression 
in our popular literature, which ought to be 
frequently and fairly weighed by the orthodox 
clergy, and which, so far as they may be found 
to spring not entirely from our mistaking Jesus' 
method, but from some misapprehension of our 
real intentions in the administration of Christ's 
church, or from popular prejudices resting upon 
half truths, we should spare no pains to remove 
or correct. 

The first objection which has recently been 
brought to our attention, is that the churches 
have a ''tendency to repress free thouglit," and 
that '' no progress has been made in theology.*" 
I ask first of all, whether statements such as 



1 8 DISCOURSES. 

these, though novr n'eqiiently alleged, are wholly 
in accordance Trith the facts \ A tendency is 
a long-continned morement. not alwavs to be 
determiDed by the apparent direction of the mo- 
ment. AVe must not judge the sweep~) of a moun- 
tain range by the foothills : we should not meas- 
ure the trend of the coast by the little inlet 
upon whose shore we may dwelh Estimated 
by any large historic judgment, determined by 
any fair observation of the present condition of 
theological studies. I venture to affirm that it i3 
not true that the churches have a tendency to 
repress fi'ee thought. But I may be asked : Do 
you forget Col. Ingersoll's array of thumb- 
screws i Xo : I do not forget them, nor the 
labored and ingenious unfairness of Prof. Dra- 
per s book upon the *' Conflict between Religion 
and Science." In any scientific test, however, 
we should determine the invariable antecedents 
of any given phenomenon, if we would discover 
its true cause. If we study the history of intol- 
erance in a truly scientific method, and not our- 
selves under the influence of some narrowing 
prejudice, we shall find that persecutions and 
bigotry have flourished not only in the heated 




THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 



19 



air of a tropical religious fervor, but also under 
the arctic chill of stoic coldness ; not only within 
the pale of Christian faith, but also amid the 
most opposite beliefs, and even in the domain of 
science; and that, under all forms, and every- 
where, the invariable antecedents, the ultimate 
causes, of intolerance and persecution are certain 
natural limitations of men's minds, certain evil 
propensities of human nature, and bad passions of 
men's hearts. Some beliefs, it is true, may lend 
themselves more easily than others to the abuse 
of blind prejudice, and as some of the brightest 
virtues may be shadowed by the darkest faults, 
so there are noblest truths which may be turned 
to the basest uses. But many of the faults of 
Christians, and many evils to be deplored in the 
churches, I would cite rather as evidences of one 
of the fundamental doctrines of the church — the 
sad corruption of human nature, and our need 
of regeneration by a j^urer and divine Spirit. 
" What drives poetry out of the world ? " asked 
Goethe ; and he answered, '' The poets." '^ AVhat 
drives Christianity out of the world?" it might 
be asked, and we miglit answer, ''Tlie Chris- 
tians." But, in either case, a clever satire should 



20 DISCOURSES. 

not be mistaken for a sober, historical judg- 
ment. 

I am not contented, however, with a merely 
apologetic or negative answer to this objection. 
I reply again, that on the whole it does not seem 
to be true that the churches have repressed free 
thought. I will not dwell now upon their gen- 
eral service to liberty. The lawgiver of old, 
coming from the presence of the Great King to 
stand before an earthly monarch, ta bid him let 
a whole people go free, was a true prototype 
and image of the mission through the centuries 
of the religion of the Bible. But I wish to give 
a more specific answer to the objection. I affirm 
that these very creeds of the church themselves 
were the results of progressive thought, and 
marked epochs of free inquiry. They are 
the high- water marks of great movements of 
thought. That earliest of the general creeds, 
the Nicene, had three centuries of thought 
behind it. Three centuries of mental wrestling 
with the greatest problems of human thought, 
three centuries of free discussion by awakened 
and earnest minds, stand behind that creed. 
Let any man here do as I was once required to 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 2 J 

do in the class-room of a theological seminary, 
follow the course of the growth of that creed, 
from mind to mind and from age to age ; let 
him seek so to enter into and understand the 
thought finally issuing in that creed, as to be 
able to pass an examination upon it ; and, I ven- 
ture to suggest, he will find that he has sub- 
jected himself to no easy mental discipline, and 
he will feel himself, at least, debarred hence- 
forth from speaking of the creeds of the churches 
as the work of ''blind belief," of ''ignorant and 
superstitious ages." 

The same remark holds true of our great 
Protestant confessions of faith. They were 
born in liberty. They were wrought out in free 
discussion. They have passed through the fire. 
They were the work of men in whose souls were 
ringing the words with which Luther awoke 
Germany in his address to the " Christian No- 
bility," and whose hearts were vibrating to his 
lofty strain in his sermon on "The Freedom of 
the Christian Man." These words of confession 
" have drawn transcendent meanings up " from 
the lives of martyrs. When I can take my 
little boy to the State capitol, and bid him 



22 DISCOURSES. 

laugh at the tattered flags, torn to shreds, upon 
which are written the names of great battle^ 
fields of freedom, and which brave hands and 
loyal hearts once bore through the battle's storm, 
— then, but not till then, can I speak aught but 
words of reverence and gratitude for the sym- 
bols of faiths so nobly realized as these confes- 
sions which have come to us from out the great 
conflicts of the ages — faiths which have been 
borne aloft as banners by heroic spirits — creeds 
which martyrs have sealed with blood ! 

But, it may be said, we admit that these creeds 
were once wrought out in liberty, but have they 
not since become oppressive ? It is true that in 
literature, in art, in civilization, a great creative 
age is usually followed by an age of formalism 
and stagnation. Theology is not exempt from 
this general law of human progress. The crea- 
tive theology of the Reformation w^as succeeded 
by a period of pause and dogmatism. In the 
seventeenth century a Protestant legalism and 
a Protestant traditionalism sprang up and threat- 
ened to overgrow the theology of the Reforma- 
tion. Something of that tendency to embalm 
faith safely in conf essionalism may possibly still 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 23 

linger, and manifest itself occasionally^ in a stiff, 
pulseless orthodoxism ; but the spirit of seven- 
teenth century dogmatism is certainly not the 
spirit of the living orthodox theology of to-day. 
The late Prof. Bagehot, in his bright little book 
on '^ Physics and Politics," remarks that one of 
the first necessities for a savage tribe becoming 
civilized, is to gain a '^ legal fibre," a "crust of 
custom." And the next necessity, he says, may 
be to break up that crust. The growth of 
Christianity may not be free from this general 
condition of progress. But Christianity has 
shown wonderful power in breaking up its own 
crusts. They are breaking up now^ The ice is 
going out. The primal Christian faiths are not 
departing ; never fear that they shall be swept 
away ! But every form that is in the way of 
true religious progress, every crust which is no 
longer useful, Christianity in the churches is 
preparing to break up. 

Neither is it true that at the present time our 
creeds are generally used repressively as con- 
ditions of membership in the church. Has any 
member of this church, as a condition of admis- 
sion to its feUowsliip, ever been asked to sub- 



24 DISCOURSES, 

scribe to the Westminster Confession? There 
may be instances where good men have been 
kept by doctrinal obstructions from the Lord's 
table, but they are rare, and happily are becom- 
ing rarer. Why, two hundred years ago, in that 
denomination which traces back its faith to the 
same general historical confessions which we 
follow, in the Cambridge platform of the Con- 
gregational churches, it was expressly wTitten 
that in the examination of candidates for admis- 
sion to the church '^ a rational charity " should 
be exercised, and 'Hhe weakest measure of 
faith " should be accepted. 

If any man wishes to be known as a dis- 
ciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, to confess him, 
and to keep his commandments ; if he is willing 
to come humbly and sincerely as a disciple, and 
in the spirit of a disciple ; let him knock and 
see whether any orthodox church, in any intelli- 
gent Christian community, will now turn him 
aside, even though he be weak in the faith, 
before he complains that our long creeds are 
put in the way between him and the Master ; 
and then, if he should be rejected, I am not the 
only orthodox clergyman who would stand with 



I 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 25 

him outside the churcli, if needs must be, for 
the principle of Christian liberty ! 

Though our creeds are not now generally 
abused as conditions of church-membership, we 
are reproached, however, on account of the re- 
strictions placed by most evangelical bodies 
upon their clergy ; it is said that they are ^' not 
free to express their honest convictions." If 
that is the fact, I have happily been uncon- 
scious of it. I have not, up to the present 
hour, found my liberty to think under the law 
of truth — and that is the only freedom an 
honest mind can desire — abridged, or inter- 
fered with, in the church. It is true that 
there are still to be found in some churches 
a few theological Nimrods who are mighty 
hunters before the Lord, and the beginnings 
of whose kingdom is Babel. It is true, also, 
in any of our denominations, that if a man 
brings to them a contentious spirit, he will 
very likely receive of the same measure which 
he gives. If he begins his ministry with the 
sword, he will probably perish by the sword, 
and he ought to perish by the sword ! But if 
any man does, to-day, honest, constructive work ; 



26 DISCOURSES. 

if he tries to bring to this generation the truths 
of God which it needs, he may hope to find 
friends springing up all around him, to receive 
words of encouragement from brave men in all 
the churches, and to meet with scholarly criti- 
cism even from seats of conservatism.^ 

^' Yes," it will be said, '^ but there stands the 
Westminster Confession, gloomy and forbidding 
— what will you say of that ? " It does not 
stand as a prison-house in which any of us are 
shut up. The system of philosophy which was 
built up into that confession we are not com- 
pelled to accept. But, if you admit that its 
language is moss-grown, and its philosophy an- 
tiquated, why do you not at once remove or 
revise it? I might answer with truthfulness 
that a historical confession, historically inter- 
preted, may possibly afford larger liberty than 
could be enjoyed under a modern confession 
legally interpreted. But more than this needs 
to be said. Our '^ Confession of Faith " is under 
revision at the present time. Ifc is under revi- 
sion in every intelligent sermon in e\eTj thought- 
ful Presbyterian pulpit. It is imder revision 
in every live Presbyterian seminary, and in every 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 27 

good Presbyterian paper. Moreover, within the 
memory of this generation, the Westminster Con- 
fession has been factually revised — revised in 
fact, if not in form. Thanks to the fathers, 
many of whom are still living, such a revision 
took place in the admission of the New Eng- 
land, or New School, theology into full recogni- 
tion in the reunited Presbyterian church ; and 
that revision, real, if not formal, is my warrant 
— and it is the sufficient warrant for any minis- 
ters whose are the fathers, but whose faces are 
turned toward the future — for occupying in 
good conscience a Presbyterian pulpit. 

Still it may be asked, why not bring at once 
your ecclesiastical standards into line with the 
more enlightened theology of the church? I 
answer again, creeds are not to be made in a 
day. They are necessarily of slow growth. 
Many of us may think the old house needs to 
be rebuilt ; some of its chambers may be too 
narrow, some of the ceilings too low ; but Ave 
do not mean to move our family until we ai'o 
sure that the new house is thoroughly built and 
seasoned. We are not so impatient as to be 
willing to put green timber into its construe- 



28 DISCOURSES, 

tion. We prefer to build of seasoned timber. 
Some question whether this is a creed-building 
age. There are still open questions upon which 
we are looking for more light. There are re- 
sults of modern investigations to be thoroughly 
sifted and tried. Let the work of formal revi- 
sion of our standards go on and be brought to 
completion as speedily as it may. Many of us 
will rejoice in that day, and are indeed strait- 
ened in mind until that good work be accom- 
plished. But we are more anxious to do the 
real work of revision, to adjust our own faiths 
happily to modern conditions of thought, and to 
learn to preach them m the new tongues of 
knowledge, than we are impatient to record the 
results of our labors in the organic law or con- 
stitution of our church. So long as that law is 
not used oppressively ; so long as we have ac- 
corded to us the liberty of Christ in the church ; 
we will seek first, as far as the truth may shine 
before us and lead us on, to do the real work of 
revision, and be content to leave the results to 
time. Conflicts, indeed, may yet arise for liberty 
within the church, as they have in the past. 
Then the hour will find the men. But conflicts 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 



29 



shall not be precipitated by any impatience of 
ours. True reform cannot be wrought in an 
hour; the great base of the advancing wave 
does not move so fast as the curling crest which 
breaks into foam upon the beach. Reformed 
creeds come not in a moment, but they are 
always only questions of time. The best 
thought in all Christian denominations is at 
work simplifying, elevating, reforming our the- 
ology ; lifting the whole body of it up into a 
purer ethical light ; and we can wait in hope ; 
we shall have revised confessions of our faith, 
if not to-day, perhaps to-morrow. 

This whole objection, therefore, that our 
churches and our creeds stand in the way of 
free Christian thought — thought loyal to Chris- 
tian truth — seems to be at the present time, to 
a very large extent at least, an anachronism — 
an objection which, as somewhat out of date 
and really behind the times, may be deemed 
outlawed in any court of large, reasonable 
judgment of present facts and tendencies. 

It has been urged, however, that theology 
has made no progi-ess. Here, also, I would join 
issue upon the facts, and reply that theology 



30 DISCOURSES. 

has made great and gratifying progress ; and 1 
will give the following specifications that my 
assertion may not be left indefinite : (1.) The- 
ology has made progress in its methods. There 
are theologians who have been quick to avail 
themselves of improved scientific and historical 
methods of inquiry. It costs more now, more 
time and more study, than it did formerly to 
obtain a good theological education. One must 
receive a broader and more varied training to 
be held now in any repute among theologians. 
(2.) Theology has made progress in its language. 
The natural language for the expression of spir- 
itual truths has been greatly enhanced by our 
sciences. Nature was never so rich a parable 
of the kingdom of heaven. Any one familiar 
with our best current theological literature is 
sensible of this freshness and new power of ex- 
pression which spiritual thought is receiving 
from natural science. (3.) Theology has made 
progress along the lines of certain great doc- 
trines, among which I will specify these: our 
idea of God, and the relation of the natural to 
the supernatural ; our conception of the Person 
and the work of Christ, and our view of the 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 31 

future life. These particulars will form the 
subject of subsequent discourses. 

I pass now to a second general objection to 
our creeds recently urged among us, one often 
felt, too, by believers as well as by unbelievers. 
Difficulty is found in the fact that the Christian 
doctrines, as commonly received, transcend expe- 
rience and contain mysteries. " Nothing which 
is revealed," it is popularly urged, ^' can be mys- 
terious." What? A revelation cannot be mys- 
terious ! But the very day is a mystery of light 
which, with all our science, we cannot under- 
stand. Can there be no partial revelations, no 
progressive revelation ? Are there not realities 
coming for a moment within the dim horizons of 
our consciousness — realities more felt than seen ? 
" Nothing which is revealed can be mysterious ! " 
One needs only to dwell amid the daily revela- 
tions of a Christian home to know that there 
are verities of affection believed in with all the 
heart, love which 

** My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace," 

the depth and breadth and height of wliich eter- 
nity only can comprehend. " Just so far as the 



32 DISCOURSES. 

Bible is a revelation," we are assured, "just so 
far it ceases to be mysterious." That reasoning 
which is so often uro^ed ao:ainst the Christian 
doctrine, is at best only a half truth ; it needs 
to be completed with this truth — just so far as 
the Bible is a revelation it will bring to light 
mysteries still to be revealed. This common 
difficulty ^^^.th revelation on account of its mys- 
teries is an instance of the fi'equent fallacy of 
suppressing the minor premise in our thinking. 
The objection urged is true only according to 
the idea of revelation which is left unquestioned 
and unmentioned in the reasoning ; but that is 
the very idea that needs to be determined. To- 
wards the close of the last century a system of 
philosophy was built upon this idea that only 
those thino;s are true which can be clearly un- 
derstood. But the period of "lUuminism" in 
Germany proved to be shallow and transient, 
and this philosophy of wisdom vrithout myste- 
ries bore very much the same relation to the 
real life of reason that a Japanese 23ictm'e, with- 
out light or shade, bears to a painting of Rem- 
brandt. Every science reveals mysteries. You 
cannot talk to your child about your own life 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 33 

in the world without exciting his wonder by 
your words. Every light brings to view the 
larger circle of darkness. What is knowledge 
but a growing wonder ? No revelation, then, of 
a future life could be given to us which would 
not leave even more than it discloses in shadow 
and mystery. We should remember that per- 
plexities which we often feel with regard to the 
future life — the burden of questions which we 
cannot lift — are occasioned by the very fact 
that we do have some faith in immortality, and 
that Christianity has opened to us some revela- 
tion of the hereafter. 

Having thus pointed out the evident fallacy 
in this popular objection against the doctrines of 
faith because they contain mysteries, I should 
do work very unsatisfactory to myself, at least, 
if I did not hasten to point out the truth, also, 
which is in it. For there is a truth underlying 
this reasoning of doubt. A revelation which 
contains mysteries, and in many respects tran- 
scends experience, must have, at least, some 
points of contact with human reason, and in 
part it will verify and confirm itself in human 
experience. This is precisely what the religion 



34 DISCOURSES. 

of the Bible does. It finds us in our truest 
human experiences. If I am reading a book of 
travels and find the descriptions trustworthy of 
places where I have been, and of scenes with 
which I am familiar, I may give credence to the 
writer when he describes countries which I have 
never visited, or narrates events unlike any which 
I may have witnessed. This is Jesus' own argu- 
ment for his authority in declaring truths which 
transcend our little experience : " If I have told 
you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall 
ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" 
Because we can and have verified revelation in 
those teachings in which it does submit itself to 
reason, conscience, and the proof of experience, 
we believe it, also, in those heavenly teachings 
which transcend our understandings, and of 
which Jesus has many things to say, but not 
now. 

Those who object to the churches on account 
of their creeds remind us sometimes, and with 
reason, that we should prefer above all things, 
the " spiritual teachings" of Jesus. But let us 
take care not to play fast and loose with the 
meaning of words. The word spiritual is rich 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS. 35 

and comprelieiisive. It implies that we are 
spirits; that there is a side of human nature 
turned toward the unseen; that the soul, itself 
an unseen presence, has some relation to the In- 
visible ; that there is a Father of spirits. The 
spiritual teachings of Jesus comprise more than 
our mere human duties or moral conduct ; they 
involve our religious position and bearing, our 
obligations to God, our relations, right or wrong, 
towards God. But still more than this is com- 
prehended in these teachings. Christianity is 
not a mere philosophy ; it is a spirit of life, em- 
bodied in historical fact. It is a divine Spirit 
living, breathing, among men, actuating and in- 
spiring a chosen people, its organ and means of 
revelation — the Spirit given at last without 
measure to the Christ in whom all the law and 
the prophets were fulfilled. The spiritual teach- 
ings of Jesus involve, therefore, his teaching 
concerning the work of God in the history of 
the chosen people, and concerning his own Per- 
son and life as a revelation in the form of man 
of the glory of the Father; in short, his whole 
doctrine of the kingdom of God already come, 
and to come, on earth. These " spiritual teach- 



36 DISCOURSES. 

ings" of Jesus in their compreliensiveness the 
churches seek in their confessions of faith to 
embrace and to interpret. 

We would not, then, be understood to hold 
our creeds as perfect ecclesiastical fortifications, 
or even as complete statements of theological 
truth. Revelation, like nature, is larger than 
our largest knowledge of it, and whenever one 
finishes his system of thought, and closes up all 
its definitions, he is sure to have left some truth 
out. We would leave, at least, on every side of 
our spiritual heritage, gates open into the undis- 
covered country — those realms of life and light 
which stretch beyond our present horizons ; but 
while we would not shut ourselves up in dog- 
matic exclusiveness, — while we would keep the 
windows open for any ray of light to stream in, 
or for any birds of passage to pour in upon us 
their songs from the skies, — we rejoice that we 
are not left by the God of the Bible without 
shelter and houseless, to wander in orphanage of 
spirit, without country or home. There are 
truths old and familiar, at whose friendly hearth 
we have learned to rest and to wait ; there are 
some faiths, tried and sure, in which, as did 



k 



THE CHURCHES AND CREEDS, 



37 



our fathers before us, we can live and would 
die. 

But if, after all that has been said, any one 
should still ask, why not, in view of the ad- 
mitted difficulties of doctrine and creed, suffer 
us to live contented with the simple, moral pre- 
cepts of Jesus, I will answer that question when 
any man can tell me if he has ever seen a field 
of wheat growing and ripening without any ex- 
panse of sky over it ? The grain cannot mature 
without a sky. There can be no perfect moral- 
ity without some chemistry of the heavens in it. 
Every life needs some sky. Every man, we 
urge, has a larger life to live than that part of 
it which is turned towards this world or one's 
fellow men. Keligion is morality towards God. 
A man's real creed is his working-theory of life. 
The churches seek, by their doctrines, however 
far short of the spiritual teachings of Jesus they 
may fall, to present to men the largest and best 
working-theory of life. We would warn the 
young against partial and defective working- 
theories of life. We would preach tlie Gospel 
of Christ as the one sufficient, and complete, and 
tried, working-theory of life. 



II. 

DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 
God is love.— 1st John, iv. 16. 

If one should pursue in the pulpit, with pains- 
taking thouglit, the line of reasoning which the 
Christian scholarship of to-day regards as com- 
manding the lower lines of materialism and 
modern scepticism, he would very probably be 
met with the reproach that he was evading the 
objections which are popularly urged against 
the Bible, and the difficulties which are still 
lying unremoved in the minds of the people. I 
think that is true, and I am glad that it is true. 
The best Christian scholarship does evade the 
common troubles of popular infidelity as a 
f ":aveller up an Alpine pass evades the fogs and 
.lie mists which lie in the valleys beneath. 
/he Christian scholarship of the present day 
does escape the difficulties upon which an In- 



D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 39 

gersoll expects faith to make shipwreck of itself, 
as the mariner avoids the shoals and the break- 
ers on the coast, who has the courage to spread 
his sails to the airs of heaven, and chooses the 
breadth and freedom of the ocean for his heritage. 
Having already considered some objections 
which are popularly raised against the manner 
in which our creeds are held in the churches; 
having urged their necessary uses, while admit- 
ting that a progressive church, led by the Spirit 
of Christ, must always keep its historical con- 
fessions under the process of revision and adap- 
tation to new environments of thought ; I have 
now to enter upon a somewhat larger field of 
discussion, and to take up the question which 
we ought fairly to consider, whether the ortho- 
dox theology of the present hour stands in the 
way of faith. We should be willing, in the in- 
terest of truth, and of faith as well, to review 
at any time our own positions, to search our own 
creeds, to satisfy ourselves whether, in the con- 
tents of our beliefs, there is anything which can 
justly be subjected to the charge of being a 
hindrance to spiritual faith among thoughtful 
and honest minds. In such review and revi- 



40 DISCOURSES, 

sion of our beliefs, I do not, however, feel called 
upon to answer old objections, often urged, 
against the Latin or Calvinistic theology. I 
am to speak simply for what I regard as the 
orthodox theology of to-day. Are its beliefs 
oppressive to moral reason, or difficulties in the 
way of spiritual thought ? 

The particular class of doubts and misgivings 
concerning our theology which I would consider 
this evening, may be fairly summarized, I think, 
in this single sentence : Orthodoxy is charged 
with misunderstanding and misrepresenting God. 
This is certainly a most serious charge, and one 
which orthodoxy should be ready earnestly and 
humbly to weigh. Of all beings God has been 
most misunderstood — misrepresented by many 
who have not wished to do his will, and misun- 
derstood ofttimes in the bosoms of his chosen 
friends. It is a coarse, and yet too common re- 
mark that the creed of the churches '^ sets up a 
demon in the place of God " — a being who " con- 
forms more nearly to our idea of a devil than 
of a God." 

There is one thing with regard to this re- 
proach so often cast upon our theology which I 



D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 41 

can say without any fear of contention : should 
any person seek for admission into this, or any 
other evangelical church, and say, ^' I am will- 
ing to confess faith in your creeds — I will be- 
lieve your doctrines — though they make God 
seem to me to be a terrible being, like a de- 
mon ; " our answer would be prompt and deci- 
sive. No ! we will not accept such a confes- 
sion ! Let God be true, though every man be a 
liar ! We do not want you so to believe, so to 
understand, our creeds, as to make the church 
to you a place of devil-worship. Kather would 
we have you come in as a little child, knowing 
only that you have a heart that needs God, a 
heart that needs divine mercy and forgiveness, 
than have you stand here and confess with your 
lips our systems of divinity, if their meaning to 
you should darken the heavens, or rob your 
own conscience of its sense of the truth and 
beauty of the Lord. 

But more than this mio-ht be said. It mio'ht 
be shown that tlie whole history of the ortho- 
dox conception of God, from the first century 
Tuitil now, has been the history of a ])rogressive 
idea. The revelation which began in the lie- 



42 DISCOURSES. 

brew fear of the Lord God Almiglity, and which 
^ ^as finished in the manifestation of God in the 
.person of Christ — the completed revelation of 
God in the Bible — arose, at length, upon a 
world full of false ideas of deitr, into whose at- 
mosphere, laden with emanations of evil, it shone, 
burning up the fogs, sometimes, indeed, itself 
overclouded, but always breaking thi^ough the 
clouds, and filling the whole world more and 
more with the knowledge and glory of God. 

Leaving, however, this possible historical 
justification of the idea of God which has been 
growing in Christian theology, I vrish rather to 
ask whether the idea of God now cherished in 
the representative minds of representative 
churches, is justly liable to this reproach of 
morally misunderstanding God. On the con- 
trary it seems to me that the representative 
evangelical theology of the present day is avail- 
ing itself reverently, yet boldly, of the best 
methods of o^rowino^ in the knowledo-e of God. 

It is not ^vith men in general a question, 

must we worship ? but whom, and how \ TTe 

iio;ht almost assert that there are no confessed, 

educated atheists at the present day. For sci- 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GODf 43 

3nce does not say, ^' There is no God;" but, ^'I 
cannot see ; I do not know," The great ques- 
tion is, can God be known ? and orthodoxy, in- 
stead of degrading man's being, and regarding 
the moral nature as a paralytic to the touch of 
divine influences, affirms that the spirit which is 
in man can and does respond to the energy, in 
its own thought and life, of the Spirit of God ; 
that man is capable of some real, though par- 
tial, knowledge of God ; that the reason and the 
conscience are the organs of spiritual apprehen- 
sion through which man looks up into the very 
nature of deity. You will find the orthodoxy 
of to-day asserting in the schools of philosophy, 
as well as before the people, the fact that man 
has a spiritual birthright, that in every beat of 
his heart, in every thought which he thinks, he 
can, and he does, know something about God. 

Orthodoxy, then, honors the reason and the 
conscience as the organs of spiritual knowledge. 
It finds a higher power at the fountains of our 
moral and religious consciousness; and all ra- 
tional thought is the outflowing, or develop- 
ment, of the divine life which is in us, and of 
the divine truth revealed to the spirit in man, 



44 DISCOURSES, 

of wliich all visible things are the metaphors 
and expression. 

But this is not all. Our Christian theology 
not only avails itself of these natural means of 
knowing God — means of spiritual apprehension 
which have not been wholly lost or destroyed 
by the terrific, blinding power of sin; but 
Christian theology remembers, also, with grate- 
ful recognition, this great truth of God, ^^ He 
first loved us," and it would, therefore, accept 
the providences in which that Love, before our 
thought of God, has sought to make itself 
known among men, and it would look up to 
the mysteries of God, and study the thoughts 
of God toward us, through a historic revela- 
tion. 

But here I strike upon one of the strongest 
objections that has ever been made against 
Christian theology. I will not state it to you 
in the imperfect and more easily answered form 
in which it lies before me in a popular presen- 
tation of it ; for I think there is a real difiiculty 
here which should be fairly met, and I will 
bring it before you in the form in which it has 
entered into the history of modern thought, iu 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD ? 45 

its strongest and most formidable presentation. 
I shall read to you Lessing's famous reason for 
his disbelief in historical Christianity, for I wish 
to show that Orthodoxy at least is honest, and 
will keep nothing back ; that there are Chris- 
tian ministers in Christian pulpits who prefer, 
when occasion offers, not to take advantage of 
imperfect popular statements of objections to 
their faith, but to deal honestly and fairly with 
those objections in their strongest and best 
forms, 

^'If no historical truth can be demonstrated," 
wrote Lessing, ''then, also, can nothing be dem- 
onstrated through historical truths. That is, 
accidental truths of history cannot be the evi- 
dence of necessary truths of reason." That is 
the brightest and best thing that rationalism 
has ever said. It presents the most serious dif- 
ficulty which philosophic doubt can raise against 
a simple historical faith in Christianity. '' This," 
says Lessing, continuing his argument that 
truths such as the received belief in Christianity 
affirms, cannot be demonstrated by truths which 
are only historically certain, '^ This is the foul, 
broad ditch over which I cannot come, often 



46 DISCOURSES. 

and earnestly as I have made the spring. Can 
any one help me over? Let him do it, I entreat 
him; I adjure him! " 

Providence was already leading the church 
over that chasm between historical and spiritual 
faith which Lessing found unbridged by the 
theology of his day. The practical answer, as 
has been well said, which Providence gave to 
rationalism was Moravianism and Methodism. 
Through the historical gospel of the life and 
work of Jesus, souls became filled with a new 
sense of God, and aglow with the light of the 
Spirit ; — the Spirit of truth and of power used 
these facts of the gospel history as the chosen 
means of its own work of saving souls. 

Providence gave, also, as the philosophical 
answer to Lessing's reluctant rationalism, a pro- 
founder and a purer theology than Lessing 
found in the orthodoxism of his day — a theology 
which has searched the depths of Christian con- 
sciousness, and which has found in Christian 
life and experience the present and immediate 
evidence of the religion of the Bible. This re- 
vivified theology sees in Christianity not simply 
a Christ-idea, but a Christ-fact in the world, and 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GODf 47 

it finds the real and commanding evidence ol 
tliat divine fact in humanity in its present and 
continuous pov^er, in its living energy and spir- 
itual efficacy, in the consciousness of believers. 
Experience proves that when a mind is brought 
into vital contact with historical Christianity, 
with the facts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that 
mind at once, and as though a new and divine 
energy had touched it, expands and rises to 
enlarged and purified conceptions of God. 

Thus a boy in Japan once found a leaf of the 
Bible — a simple, bare record of historical fact. 
But it led him across the ocean in search of the 
Christian's God. He learned our language, and, 
as historical Christian records were brought to 
his knowledge, just as any other book might have 
been brought, his mind seemed to pass through 
what was almost a new creation ; it rose to such 
conceptions of the Deity as it had never before 
imagined — the witness of the Spirit within con- 
firmed the record of God given in the historical 
gospel ; and that boy, become now a Christian 
man, has gone back to Japan a missionary of tlie 
Cross of Christ, and has lived to see liis own 
parents destroy their idols under the influence 



48 DISCOURSES, 

of the same historical testimony to God in 
Christ. This, I say, is what historical Christi- 
anity has done thousands of times in bringing 
to men knowledo-e of the true God — that knowl- 
edo-e which is eternal life. 

The vast difference between a merely moral 
or ideal belief in God and that knowledge of 
God which is given and assured in Christian 
experience through God revealed in Christ, may 
perhaps be made visible by a simple illustra- 
tion. Suppose a child to have lost its parents 
in infancy, and to have been carried to another 
country and brought up among strangers who 
never had known them. That child might 
gain, as he grew of age, a theoretical, but not a 
personal, knowledge of what it is to have a 
mother and father. He would come to know 
these first, best facts of human experience by in- 
ference and deduction, but from no real vital 
experience of them, as the child cradled in love, 
and growing up in a happy Christian home, 
knows them by heart, and can never forget them 
in the after years, wherever he may wander. 
Such is the difference between ' natural and re- 
vealed religion — between a faith in God de- 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 



49 



pendent upon philosophical conclusions, and a 
real experience of God manifest in Christ. Our 
Christian faith is the experience of the man who 
has been brought up from childhood in the 
Father's house. For God revealed himself of 
old, in the childhood of humanity, as the one 
supreme authority and guide, the law of human 
history. He gave commandments, promises, 
warnings, through holy men inspired by the 
Holy Ghost. The Word came and dwelt among 
us in the form of man. He has lived — the 
Lord has lived — a divine life upon this earth, 
with us, and for us — a life of God in our hu- 
man history and through history ! " My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work." God has not 
remained beyond the stars, unknown and at an 
infinite distance. He has been present as a 
divine fact and a divine power among men, 
present in the supernatural development of that 
religion whose supreme and final revelation is a 
sinless life, and a character unique and peerless, 
through which is declared the very glory of the 
Father. Therefore we say, we have more than 
a religion of ideas; ours is abetter confession 
of faith than that; we have a religion of what 
3 



50 DISCOURSES. 

God has done for us; a religion of historical 
facts, which ai*e full of the glory and praise of 
the Father; a religion which, upon the founda- 
tion which is laid deep in the earthliness and 
sinfulness of our history, rises to heights of 
Christian experience around which still shines 
the light of the love of God. So the past fact 
of Christ in history becomes the present truth 
of the Spirit of Christ in human hearts. 

Many who seem ready to cast loose from his- 
torical Christianity would retain their belief in 
the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of 
man. But do they not know that those very 
beliefs came through these historical channels, 
came borne to earth upon these historical 
facts ? that what no pagan philosophy had ever 
succeeded in accomplishing was historically 
wrought into the character of a chosen people ? 
and that Christianity, the outcome of the re- 
ligion of the Bible, first bore to a world of bend- 
ing slaves and woman, degraded and forlorn, 
these great faiths, which are our Christian heri- 
tage — the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man ? ^ 

To sum up, then, the result, so far, of my 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 51 

reasoning, orthodoxy, I would claim, avails it- 
self of the best methods of knowing God, viz., 
conscience and reason, and historical revelation. 
I may go still farther, and assert that, partial 
and unworthy as we must confess are our best 
thoughts of God, nevertheless, our progressive 
orthodoxy has gained, and is growing in, the 
most purely moral conception of God which can 
be found anywhere in this world. 

In this direction there has been great and 
gratifying progress since the reformation. Re- 
member that the reformers brought, and it was 
necessary that they should bring to their world, 
this truth : that God is Lord, alone is King. By 
two revolutionary truths — truths which came to 
them through a historical revelation — Luther 
and Calvin changed the face of modern civiliza- 
tion. Luther rose up in the freedom of the 
Christian man against a soul-enslaving power, 
and proclaimed the doctrine of justification by 
faith. John Calvin stood over against that great 
world-enslaving power, the power of the papacy, 
whicli was assuming God's throne on earth, and 
proclaimed — there is only one King, one Lord, 
whose government not only controls nations, but 



52 DISCOURSES. 

Avhose decree, also, reaches down beneatli indi- 
vidual liberty, and upholds all things by its in- 
f rustrable power ; — and by that mighty truth of 
divine sovereignty Calvin and the reformers did 
what infidelity has never done, what a thousand 
IngersoUs could never do, sounded forth a tri- 
umphant peal for the liberty of the souls of 
men, and set the modern nations free. It is to 
Calvinism, more than to any other single power, 
that the modern State owes its liberty; and, 
though we may have found a larger life and a 
higher thought of God than our fathei^s knew, 
there is a needed reproof for any who would 
belie the spiritual parentage of our laws and 
liberties in the old and homely proverb, '^ It is 
an ill bird that fouls its own nest." 

Orthodoxy has accomplished more than Cal- 
vinism began to do. Progressive orthodoxy has 
reached a higher conception of the Godhead 
than it was permitted the Calvinistic reformers 
to gain. For Calvinism, as it confronted the 
great despotism over souls with its sublime doc- 
trine of the divine sovereignty, after all pre- 
sented but a half-truth of divinity to men, and 
it had itself much of the Gospel still to learn. 



DOES OR THODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GODf 53 

Theologians, seizing its leading truth, worked it 
out to its extreme consequences, and we should 
be thankful that they did; for just as material- 
ism, or Haeckelism, has shown that Darwinism, 
if carried to its extreme results, fails to give a 
complete solution of the problem of life, so Cal- 
vinism, logically worked out, carried to its ex- 
treme consequences, shows itself to be in need 
of Christ, in need of the Gospel of love, in need 
of being lifted bodily up into a higher, more 
ethically Christian conception of God, our 
Father in heaven. The chief want of Calvin- 
istic confessions of faith is the play of the 
light and hope of the gospel over thenu Their 
divine truths are left too much in the shadow 
of their human philosophy. A system of theol- 
ogy may be firmly constructed, and solid as a 
granitic formation ; but if it is to be true to 
nature and the Bible, God's sunlight must not 
be shut out. 

The reaction from Calvinistic theology at first 
tended toward the other extreme. Men becran 
to chase the sunbeams and to lose firm footins: 
on everlasting principles. After the reformers, 
by sterner truths, had gained men's liberty, their 



54 DISCOURSES, 

descendants seemed disposed to enthrone a com- 
plaisant good-nature, or a distant indifference, 
as God; they remembered that the Lord is mer- 
ciful, and they began to overlook the dark, world- 
destroying power of sin. But orthodoxy, hav- 
ing learned something of its own earlier fatal- 
istic eiTor, but avoiding this other humanitarian 
extreme, went on to work out from nature, the 
human heart, and the Bible, its own truth of 
the Godhead; and I have before me a book 
that has just come fi'om the press, in which the 
greatest living theologian. Prof. Dorner, has 
gathered up the ripe fi^uit of his theological 
studies, and I find there such conceptions of God 
in the completeness of his attributes and fulness 
of his love, as make both mind and heart rejoice 
in the gloiy of the Lord. Where else in the 
whole field of theoloo^ical literature can be 
found nobler, worthier^ more thoroughly ethical 
conceptions of God than the orthodox theology 
of to-day is giving through its living masters ? 
Escaping the limitations both of Calvinism and 
humanitarianism, it would have us worship God 
as infinitely majestic, and holy, and yet un- 
speakably beautiful and attractive. God is 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD / 5 5 

love. This is the Christian philosophy of God, 
working itself out through the centuries, freed 
from the corruptions of Paganism, and clearing 
itself, also, from the shadows of scholastic the- 
ology. God is love — love which itself is a 
trinity, the unity of three primitive rays divine. 
For love, in the one ray or primal color of it, is 
benevolence — the giving of self for another's 
good ; and love is, also, sympathy — the putting 
self in place of another, living another's life, the 
vicariousness of the cross ; and love is also self- 
respect — the unselfish assertion of its own 
worth, the preservation of its own good in the 
world. Benevolence, vicariousness, righteous- 
ness, form the three-fold nature of love, which 
itself is a unity of life. God is love ; love which 
includes all his attributes — mercy, sympathy, 
goodness, justice — all that can enter into the 
nature of a perfect and adorable Deity, so that 
the very omnipotence of God is itself an attri- 
bute of love, and with the wisdom of God 
serves always his love. '' Love," insists Prof. 
Dorner, "is tlie power in God over his own om- 
nipotence." If we once rise freely and exult- 
iiigly to this thoroughly evangelical conception 



56 DISCOURSES. 

of God, we sliall find that \ye are above and 
beyond many of the difficulties and doubts 
which often perplex and imprison f aith.^ 

Orthodoxy, then, takes its doctrines and the 
facts of nature, and thinks them out just so far 
as it can without coming in conflict with its 
own conception of God ; and when it finds that 
it is coming into conflict with its own faith in 
God, it stops short in its reasonings, and bows 
its head, and hides its own questionings in the 
heart of its assured knowledge of the Love 
whom it adores. Predestination, election, all 
these objectionable doctrines, these ^^ horrible 
doctrines " — what will orthodoxy do with them ? 
The worst doctrine of election to-day is taught 
by our natural science. The scientific doctrine 
of natural selection is the doctrine of election 
robbed of all hope, and without a single touch 
of human pity in it. I blame not our science ; 
it simply seeks to be true to the facts of law 
and life ; it finds even in nature a continuous 
process of selection unbroken from the begin- 
ning until now; but while it holds that all 
things may possibly work together for some far 
off and larger good, it has not a single tear of 



D OES OR THOD OXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD? 57 

pity to let fall for tlie individual who may be 
crushed beneatli life's heavy load. What does 
our theology — our " hard theology " — have to 
say ? It will not turn from the facts. What- 
ever else you may say of it, modern orthodoxy 
is no coward ! It has become used to the edge 
of the precipice, it has looked down into the 
depths, its ear is haunted with the sound of the 
cataracts ! It will look the facts in the face — 
the fact of sin, the fact of divine law, the fact 
of condemnation and death. But orthodoxy 
does also what no science can do ; it takes these 
facts and holds them up before its clear, shining 
faith that God is love. It takes these facts, 
awful though they are, and brings them to 
Jesus, and leaves them at the foot of the Cross, 
Orthodoxy sees the chasms, and the precipices, 
and the wild cataracts ; but it sees, also, shed 
abroad over all, the light of the love of God; 
it would behold them no more under any cloud 
of its own foolish imaginations, or heavy, over- 
shadowing traditions ; it would see them in the 
sunlight of the Gospel, in the joy of its faith in 
the perfect goodness of the perfect God. And 
so, reserving many questions, as Erasmus once 

3* 



58 DISCOURSES. 

said they should be reserved, not until the next 
general council, but until that hour when we 
shall stand face to face with God, our theology 
has patience, and can wait. Having rested as 
a child upon the bosom of the infinite Father- 
hood of God, oui* faith is content if it can feel 
close to its own tremblino; heart the beatino^s 
of that heart which is ever true and unchange- 
able in its goodness, even though it may be 
darkness and night round about it as it lies 
upon the bosom of God. 

If, however, we are asked why should our 
theology trouble itself with thought about these 
high themes, the answer is. Christian theology 
cannot shirk ; it must think out and work out, 
so far as it has po^ver, under its own pure con- 
ception of God, these ever-present problems of 
human existence; and I reply again that the 
belief in God, the theology which we may gain 
and hold through all our questionings, is of 
most practical moment to us — the whole direc- 
tion and conduct of life will be determined 
by it. Our theology is really the most practi- 
cal concern of human life. The ancients had 
no true knowledge of the earth, as they had 



DOES ORTHODOXY MISUNDERSTAND GOD f 59 

no just conception of the sun; so there must 
be some true idea of God in order that there 
may be any adequate understanding of man, 
his wants, his range of capabilities, and his des- 
tiny; and civilizations are made to differ by 
the ideas of God which shine over them, as they 
are clear and true, or clouded and corrupted. 
A man's theology enters as an essential element 
into his daily life. It does make a difference 
in the color of the life whether, when we awake 
in the morning and enter upon the duties of the 
day, we believe in God; whether, as we go 
forth to our work, we walk as seeing Him who 
is invisible; whether, when we return to our 
homes, we gather our families together and 
offer our prayer of thanksgiving and praise to 
our Father who is in heaven. It does make a 
difference in the complexion and tenor of the 
life whether we believe in God so that our 
hearts are not troubled or afraid ; and it does 
make a difference, too, in the rightness of a 
man's character, whether he holds a true filial 
relation to the person of God ; for, if God is 
love, capable, because he is love, of entering 
into personal relations with his creatures, then 



6o DISCOURSES. 

there are duties which, we owe to God — and one 
duty cannot be made the substitute for another 
duty. Honesty in your business would not ex- 
cuse you for a lack of patriotism, nor patriotism 
for a want of kindness in your home ; and if 
there be a God, our Father and our Friend, 
then, as we have duties toward one another, so, 
also, there is a morality which we owe to God* 
Christ, then, was right when he said, " Seek ye 
first the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness " — that righteousness which is the sanction 
of every human duty, the inspiration of every 
moral enthusiasm, the security of true affection, 
the peace, the joy, the eternal life of the soul. 



III. 



FOEGIVEKESS AND SUEFEEHS-G. 

In the sixteenth verse of the third chapter 
of the Gospel of John is this word from Jesus — it 
must have been a revelation from Jesus, for no 
human mind ever eould have invented it, no 
human heart ever would have dreamed of it, it 
could only have proceeded from a divinely filled 
consciousness: "For God so loved the world 
that he gave His only begotten Son, that who- 
soever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life." 

I take up again the dialogue which I am 
trying to follow between belief and unbelief. 

Unbelief says. The Gospel, as generally re- 
ceived, is inconceivable, and therefore impossible. 

Belief answers. It is a fact, a divine fact in 
history, and therefore it is possible. 

Unbelief replies, The testimony upon which 
these alleged facts are based may be untrust- 



62 DISCOURSES, 

worthy; the witnesses may have been them- 
selves deceived, if not deceivers. Small germs 
of fact may have grown and blossomed into a 
cloud of beautiful myths. Or, if the time of 
the formation of the Grospel narratives seems 
too short, and the date of Christ's coming too 
late in history for this mythical explanation, 
there may have been artifice and more or less 
conscious tendency to fabrication on the part of 
the early disciples. 

Belief answers, The Gospels are as trust- 
worthy as any historical narratives. But we 
do not rely simply upon direct and explicit tes- 
timony to the facts of the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ. We have other and greater reasons for 
our faith. These facts are necessary facts. We 
cannot explain the connections and course of 
human history, before or since Christ, unless 
we admit the substantial truth of the Gospels, 
We must admit these facts, we must accept 
them in their integrity ; for otherwise the order 
and continuity of history are strangely broken. 
The facts of the Gospel are not what Lessing 
would call '' accidental truths of history ; " they 
are necessary facts — necessary to an adequate 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 63 

and thoroughly rational understanding of the 
order and issues of history. Moreover, belief 
proceeds to answer, These facts are not dead 
facts, they are living powers. The life of Julius 
Caesar we receive as a matter of historical testi- 
mony, and yet, in a certain sense, it is a dead 
fact rather than a living one — a fact of ancient, 
not modern, history; but these facts of the Gros- 
pel of Jesus Christ are still living facts — living 
historic forces, active energies in modern his- 
tory. These divine facts came into the world 
as impulsions from the Unseen ; as powers of 
the world to come ; and as such their strength 
is not abated with the years; they are still 
present and efficacious in modern society, in its 
truest life and best growth. We have, then, 
in the experience of Christian hearts and Chris- 
tian society, under the preaching of the Gospel, 
the living testimony of truth to truth — the heart 
of man still answering to the revelation of the 
heart of God. The persistent vitality and con- 
tinuous growth of evangelical religion are facts 
for which we should have some adequate ex- 
planation. Here is a marvellous fact of growth 
which implies throughout the energy of some 



64 DISCOURSES. 

hidden life. There does seem to be something 
in the heart of humanity which responds to the 
presentation of the Cross of Christ ; the heart 
of man knows its divineness, and feels its quick- 
ening power; and, as those flowers which fol- 
low the sun through the day, follow it still 
though the heavens may be overspread with 
clouds; so, although the truth of the Gospel 
may often be hidden behind our imperfect in- 
terpretations of it, nevertheless, the purest intui- 
tions, the highest aspirations, the largest hopes 
of humanity, do follow the glory of that true 
light which lighteth every man that cometh 
into the world. Here orthodoxy well might 
rest its case ; here, as matter of fact, many be- 
lievers do rest, contented to receive the gift of 
forgiveness of sin, and the love of God shed 
abroad in their hearts, in which they find life's 
best hope and sweetest joy. 

But unbelief is compelled to support its rea- 
soning against the supernatural facts of the 
Gospels, by bringing into question certain fun- 
damental ideas, also, of Christianity; and so 
belief, too, rising from the facts of Christian 
experience to the ideas of Christianity, is willing 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 6$ 

to meet the appeal to reason and conscience. 
To reason and conscience we are asked to go ; 
and to reason and conscience we will go. To 
this tribunal we would most confidently appeal ; 
but we would appeal to reason in the highest — 
a reason informed with conscience, and full of 
heart — a reason that has power of insight into 
moral realities, and intuitions of the deepest 
spiritual truths. 

The class of objections to evangelical Chris- 
tianity which we have next, then, to consider, 
relate to the views we are supposed to hold 
concerning the Person and the work of Christ. 

When Dr. Johnson was travelling one day in a 
rural district, he was asked by a country-woman 
how he could have defined in his dictionary a 
pastern as the knee of a horse. He replied, " Ig- 
norance, madame, pure ignorance." I certainly 
intend no discourtesy, yet in justice to the 
churches I am constrained to say that ignorance 
of what evangelical teaching really is seems to 
be the occasion of not a few common objections 
to it. When it is said, for example, that the 
clmrch founds its belief in the divine person of 
Christ upon the miracles which he wrought, the 



66 DISCO UI^SE^. 

statement falls very far wide of the facts. It is 
the character of Christ which is the supreme 
evidence of his supernatural person. The chief 
argument for the divinity of Christ is his hu- 
manity. Close your eyes for the time being to 
all accounts of the mighty work of Jesus ; seek 
to form a clear conception of his person and 
life ; and that character, when once really seen, 
will be its own evidence, the proof of Jesus' 
unique oneness with the Father. Then read 
again the accounts of the miracles, and they 
will seem no longer miracles when narrated of 
such a Christ ; they are as natural to him as 
our commonest deeds are to us ; they are con- 
trary to our experience of other men, but not 
contrary to the world's experience of Jesus 
Christ. The divine humanity of Christ is the 
citadel of evangelical faith. Miracles have still 
their evidential value; they are the collateral 
securities of faith : but why question the col- 
laterals when the divine handwriting in the 
character of Christ remains unimpeached and 
unimpeachable ? 

Leaving, then, with a single word, this argu- 
ment for belief in the glorious person of the 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 67 

Lord Jesus Christ, which is now the ultimate 
and commanding reason for faith usually given 
by evangelical believers, I turn to another part 
of the objection often urged against evangeli- 
cal faith in Christ. 

What does the orthodox theology of to-day 
have to say concerning the so-called sacrificial 
theology — the atonement for sin effected, as the 
churches teach, through the sufferings of Christ? 
Can we be expected still to cherish a moral and 
rational belief in the orthodox idea of atone- 
ment? 

I might, in reply, ask you to look with me 
through that progressive revelation of God, of 
which our Bible is the record and witness, and 
to seek, as we gaze down that divine perspective 
of covenant, law, and sacrifice, to determine in 
relation to the chief facts of the history of re- 
demption the place of the cross upon which the 
Messiah died ; or, I might ask you, leaving the 
circle of apostolic thought, to enter into the 
history of this doctrine, and to follow from age 
to age its development ; and thus we should be 
fitted to understand those views of the atone- 
ment which are now prevalent in the evangeli- 



68 DISCOURSES. 

cal cliurclies. But I shall invite you to a shorter 
yet more arduous task — to attempt to climb 
with me straight up to the very heights. I shall 
urge you to endeavor to take this whole doctrine 
of the work of Christ up into the pure sunlight 
of the best and most heavenly conception we can 
gain of the character of God himself — the height 
to which this doctrine is uplifted in our text : 
For God so loved the world. 

The first two steps along this path which I 
would take are indicated for me by the diffi- 
culties which are ordinarily found with the 
theology of the Cross. ^' The Bible," it is said, 
" teaches that the wag;es of sin is death. But 
when the church tells us that Christ's sufferinofs 
and death have substituted eternal life for this 
death, then our knowledge of sin — of its conse- 
quences as felt in our own souls, and as seen in 
others — tells us that this cannot be true." It 
was the first and the greatest orthodox theolo- 
gian who once wi^ote : ^^ Whatsoever a man 
soweth, that shall he also reap ;" and evangeli- 
cal theologians can hardly be accused of neg- 
lecting to preach, and with the utmost earnest- 
ness, the inevitable consequences of sin, and the 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 



59 



certainty of the laws of retribution. What 
then ? Can there be no forgiveness ? 

Whoever accepts the simple human truth in 
Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, has already 
risen above the course of natural retribution 
upon which the objector just stood, and ap- 
proaches the higher ground of grace. In that 
parable Jesus laid down the first, broad truth 
which underlies the whole power and efiicacy^ 
of his own atoning work. Sin, he would teach 
plainly, is forgivable. It is in the moral nature 
of God to forgive sin. The elder son might 
have answered, in the language of some who 
are troubled with our evangelical preaching: 
My knowledge of sin leads me to believe that 
sin must be punished; I see no justice in for- 
giving and restoring a worthless prodigal; I 
cannot *' comprehend how any faith, of whatever 
nature or degree, can suspend the eternal laws" 
by which the Father governs the world. I can- 
not see how any vioLation of law can justly 
escape the inevitable penalty — " a penalty whicli 
no belief or no prayers can avert.'' The prodi- 
gal must suffer the '' natural penalty of his sin;'' 
'^ we cannot divorce one from the other." How 



7o DISCOURSES. 

can tlie Father, who governs by '^ unchangeable 
laws," make a feast for hini ? Are not the wages 
of sin death? 

Over and against the elder brother s reason- 
ing ; over and against the theology of despair ; 
over and against this hard truth of natural retri- 
bution, Jesus taught unmistakably that the 
Father can forgive ; that in some diviner way sin 
is forgivable ; that there is some possibility for 
forgiveness in the heart of the nature of things, 
in the bosom of the Eternal. This parable does 
not yield the whole of Jesus' truth ; it is the 
beautiful beginning of the evangelical doctrine, 
the end of which was the teaching of Jesus in 
that upper chamber, when he made known to 
the disciples — to their afterthoughts, at least, 
upon his words — how, through his own suffer- 
ings, sin could be forgiven of God ; how he was 
love's own atonement for the sin of the world. 

What, then, we ask, is the divine method of 
forgiveness? How would Jesus reconcile for 
us these conflicting truths, that sin is punish- 
able and sin is forgivable? At this point let us 
seek at once to take this doctrine up into the 
light in which Jesus left it, the light of the love 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING. 71 

of God. I believe that the whole universe was 
first for the Christ, and then Christ was for the 
whole universe. I believe that the possibility of 
the cross of Christ is a possibility in the moral 
nature of things; and orthodoxy asserts with 
grateful exultation that the Gospel of the Cross 
is in accordance with our best knowledge of the 
nature both of God and man, and that doubt or 
denial of it dims the glory of Deity, and lowers 
the dignity of human nature. Let us see if it 
be not so. You remember that in speaking of 
the Christian conception of God I remarked, 
love is itself a trinity. I ask you now, there- 
fore, to look up at the Cross, and to behold the 
work of the Redeemer, in the light of each one 
of those primal rays which form together the 
perfect unity of the love of God. 

First, love is benevolence — the giving of 
self — self-impartation. Shall the love of God, 
then, pause — shall it stop in the ascent of life, 
until it has given of itself to the utmost ? until 
it has miparted the divine nature itself to the 
lioart of humanity? Love, secondly, is sympa- 
tliy — the power of putting ones' self in tlu^ 
place of another; and you know how hiiinan 



72 DISCOURSES, 

friendship enables one sometimes to enter into 
the very heart of the exf)erience of another; 
how hnman affection enables the father or 
mother to take the sin and shame of an erring 
child to their own bosoms, grieving over it, and 
snffering through it, as though it were their 
own sin and their own shame. This vicarious 
power of living in the lives of others is of the 
very essence of love — and shall God be less 
perfect than man? shall human friendship in 
its power of sympathy be more beautiful than 
the infinite love of the perfect God ? shall the 
mother's heart possess a power to enter into 
and feel as its own the sufferino; and shame of 
a lost child, which the God who made that 
mother's heart himself cannot have? I say, 
then, that to deny the vicarious power of love is 
to put a limit — a limit of nature, a limit of our 
poor understanding — upon the perfectness of 
divine love, and to make God morally less than 
man. When will we learn, when will we have 
faith enough in God's own image in humanity, 
to dare, reverently and humbly, to look down 
into the depths of the purest human affections, 
and to find mirrored there most brightly, mir- 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING, 73 

rored as nowhere else reflected from all the 
world beside, the very perfections of the Deity ? 
Love, then, in its sympathy, its vicariousness, 
must be able to do what its benevolence would 
prompt it to do in bearing our sins. But there 
is a third element in love — the element of right- 
eousness. This is love's self-respect, its true self- 
assertion, the affirmation of its own worth or 
good, eternal faithfulness to itself. This is the 
holiness of love; and without this element of 
self-respect human love would sink into license 
and lust. Righteousness is the genuineness of 
God's love. How, then — this is the very diffi- 
culty of the whole question — how can sin be 
forgivable in view of the righteousness which 
belongs to the very nature of love? Look 
again, not at any of the lower illustrations of 
mediation which may be derived from other all 
too imperfect analogies ; but look at what love 
itself can do, at what love has done. AVliat 
must it do to forgive sins against itself ? If love 
simply should consent to take the offender back 
without any penitence on his pai't, or without 
feeling and showing on its part any grief and 
suffering for the wrong with which it had been 



74 DISCOURSES, 

pierced, tlien love wonld indeed lose its self- 
respect, and be robbed of its worth and purity. 
Love can forgive — but it must suffer in- forgiv- 
ing, and by its own pain and grief for the wrong 
done, show its own recoil from sin, and condem- 
nation of it, even while it forgives and delights 
in giving back again its trust ; and there can be 
no genuine human forgiveness, no real reconcili- 
ation between friends, unless there be some suf- 
fering upon the part of both. Oh, my friends, 
perhaps this is the reason why forgiveness is for 
us so hard a virtue; we cannot truly forgive 
without some crucifixion of our very selves ! We 
do not choose to cover the wrono; done to us in 
our own shame and sorrow for it, and, condemn^ 
ing it by our own suffering for its sinfulness, to 
be willing and able, with a true heart, to forgive 
our brother; we too often would rather see the 
wrong condemned through his suffering the full 
consequence of his offence, and not by any 
suffering of our own for him and with him. 
But God in his perfect love chooses the better 
way of forgiveness, condemning the sin of the 
w^orld, while he forgives it, through a divine 
sorrow for it, through Gethsemane and the 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING, 75 

Cross ! So, often, in our human homes, the 
mother's tears, the hairs of the father turning 
gray, are the signs of the sorrow through which 
love manifests its sense of the ill-desert of sin, 
its deep, unalterable abhorrence of wrong-doing, 
while it keeps the door open for the feet of the 
returning child, and is ready at any hour to 
take its own, lost and found again, mourned 
over, suffered for, and forgiven, back to its pure 
home and happiness. If we can do this — if we 
know that we can do this — if you fathers and 
mothers know that there is a way for human 
affection to forgive without dishonoring itself, 
though it be a way of tears — cannot God do it ? 
Cannot God find the same way of forgiveness ? 
Can God be less than our human hearts ? But 
how can God suif er ? How shall the infinitely 
Blessed One find the way of tears ? How shall 
He condemn our sin and forgive it by suifering 
its wound and hurt as though it were his own \ 
The answer of revelation, the answer of liistory, 
is the Cross of Christ. As the benevolence of 
God's love finds at the end and at the head of 
the creation the place for the God-man ; as it 
takes the whole chain of created being up in its 



76 DISCOURSES. 

last link and binds it to the throne of the 
Eternal ; as through its vicariousness the divine 
love enters into man's very life, puts itself in 
the form of man in our very stead, being 
tempted as we are, making its own our experi- 
ence of sin, desertion, and death; so also the 
righteousness of love is satisfied — satisfied once 
for all and forever — in the infinite sorrow for 
sin which is manifested upon the Cross. There, 
where humanity comes nearest to the heart of 
God, where man approaches nearest to the life 
of God, where the Deity takes humanity to 
itself — there is the altar, there is the holy-place, 
there is the Gethsemane of Spirit, where sin is 
suffered for with an infinite and an efficacious 
suffering. 

The answer of orthodoxy, then, is complete. 
It is an answer resting first of all upon divine 
facts in history, and confirmed by the gracious 
experience of Christian life. It is an answer 
which is then seen to be in its ideas, also, most 
consonant with our highest and best conceptions 
of the possibilities of love, human and divine. 
Through the sufferings of One who represents 
God's whole feeling toward the sin of the 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING, 'JJ 

world, through, love's perfect conquest of evil 
upon the Cross, all the interests of the heavenly 
home may be preserved, and the righteousness 
of the Holy Father be manifested and main- 
tained, Avhile sinners, forgiven and welcomed, 
may find free entrance into every one of the 
many mansions. Should the elder brother now 
say, Father, why not inflict the threatened pen- 
alty? how can you rejoice over one who went 
and wasted his substance ? then the ansAver of 
eternal love is, that sin has been condemned 
already; condemned more earnestly, with a 
deeper condemnation, in the suffering which 
has been incurred, in the very willingness to 
bear with it, to receive in its own bosom sin's 
deadly wound, and freely to forgive it. The 
Father's sorrow expressed in the Christ, the 
divine feeling of shame for sin manifested in 
Christ's measureless grief for it, in one word, 
divine love vicariously suffering for sin, is its 
sufficient and God-like atonement. And by 
that work of God in which he satisfied himself 
in forgiving us, we are lifted out of the lower 
courses of retribution into a higher order, into 
the order of the moral universe, into the order 



78 DISCOURSES. 

of moral freedom and grace. It is true we are 
not delivered from the purely natural conse- 
quences of sin ; but does it not make a differ- 
ence whether, as we suffer the inevitable natural 
pains of sin, we suffer them in the consciousness 
that they are no longer divine inflictions of 
penalty, since God, for Christ's sake, has for- 
given us ; or whether we must endure them as 
under the displeasure of God, in utter loneliness 
and banishment of spirit ? Would it not make 
a difference to your child, who, in disobedience 
to your instruction has put his finger in the fire 
and'^een burned, whether it be left to suffer 
alone, or in the mother's arms ? Does it not 
make a difference with us, whether, when we 
die, we die alone, suffering in the darkness the 
penalty of sin, or whether we die knowing that 
even in death the everlasting arms are beneath 
us, and that close to our fainting heart beats the 
heart of the eternal Love ? Oh ! this is what 
God in Christ does for us — He takes us, even 
while we are under many of the natural conse- 
quences of sin, up into the fellowship of His 
Spirit ; takes us out of the dark sense of guilt, 
and the fear of death, up into the peace of 



I 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING, '79 

the Holy Ghost, and the communion of the 
Father. 

I have been presenting, I am aware, but one 
aspect of the atoning work of Christ — that view 
of it which seems to me to be the highest, most 
purely ethical, and most satisfying.*^ There are 
other views of it opened at different points in 
the progressive revelation of God in the Bible 
— other views corresponding to lower stages 
and analogies of human experience. But if you 
have climbed to the height of this text, God so 
loved the world ; if you have once looked abroad 
upon the revelations of divine things opening 
like broad and luminous horizons from the ele- 
vation of this truth of God, then you are above 
and beyond most of the difficulties and limita- 
tions which too often narrow and confine evan- 
gelical explanations of the atonement. And liere 
I may safely leave it to your own better reason 
— to the heart in the reason — if Jesus did not 
know the very nature of God when he taught 
that, notwithstanding all the appointed retribu- 
tions of nature, sin is forgivable ? Unless you 
are prepared to make God morally less than 
man, you will gratefully own that there must 



8o DISCOURSES, 

be found, as the Gospel of tlie Cross assures us 
there has been found, for infinite love a way of 
atonement — a way which even human love has 
often learned through love's instinct of sym- 
pathetic grief — a large, beautiful, transfiguring 
forgiveness, consistent with its own pure self- 
respect, and satisfying every thought of right- 
eousness. The atonement is thus seen to be love's 
perfect self-satisfaction in the forgiveness of sin, 
and reconciliation of the world to God.^ 

And now I ask, in all fairness, that this teach- 
ing of the evangelical pulpit shall not be cari- 
catured; that men should at least take the 
pains to understand its true spirit, and to judge 
it by the real morality of forgiveness. I ask 
3^ou to look at human nature on its diviner side, 
and not to be satisfied wdth low and narrow 
conceptions of its possibilities. I ask you to 
admit something of the capacity of God for 
loving man, and something of the capacity of 
man for the indwelling of God. Man was 
made for God, and God loved to give himself 
to man — that is the simple deep meaning of 
Jesus' Gospel. Human nature was not made 
to be a little, bustling independency of God; 



FORGIVENESS AND SUFFERING, 8i 

but to dwell in God, and God in it. I urge 
you to view these evangelical doctrines not 
simply as historical facts, but also in their ideal 
completeness and truth; and, when they are 
thus viewed, the person and work of the Lord 
Jesus become transcendently glorious to the 
reason as he is unspeakably precious to many 
hearts. 

Let it be remembered, finally, that orthodoxy 
teaches there can be and is but one limit to this 
redeeming power of God's love in Christ, and 
that is the limit of a will which persistently re- 
jects the divine. Jesus whom we love may be, 
as often he has been, misunderstood. Education 
and training, as well as the mistakes of his 
friends may prevent his light from shining un- 
dimmed upon many who fain would see him as 
his glory has shone full upon other uplifted and 
glowing souls; but no friend is more patient 
than he, or so willing to wait, if need be, through 
the ages for the world's perfect understanding 
of his work for it ; and words spoken against 
the Son of man, he himself has told us, shall be 
forgiven. Evangelical theology, in remembrance 
of this attitude and this gracious word of the 



82 DISCOURSES. • 

Master, would not make salvation dependent 
upon intellectual appreciation of its doctrines. 
Many a soul may grow to be Christ-like even in 
the dark. Christian life can spring up even 
around dim beliefs. A wise orthodoxy would 
devoutly hope that upon many souls there may 
dawn at the last day such revelations of light 
and glory from the ascended Lord, now hidden 
from them, as shall make their human virtues 
blossom into angelic beauty, and flood their 
lives with joy. But orthodoxy, obedient to the 
Master's word, teaches that there is one sin of 
the utmost danger, against which, with all 
earnestness, it would warn men again and 
ao;ain. To resist in auo;ht the divine influence ; 
to grieve the Holy Spirit ; not to be willing to 
follow the light of God which is now manifest ; 
not to be ready to receive and to welcome the 
Christ so far as he has made himself known to 
the conscience or the heart, that is sin, deep, 
dark, and dangerous — sin, which, if it grows into 
the habit, the determinate purpose of the life, 
may become the sin against the Holy Ghost 
which hath never forgiveness. 



IV. 



IMPEEFECT THEOKTES OF THE FUTURE LIFE. 

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things 
which are not seen : for the things which are seen are temporal ; but 
the things which are not seen are eternal. — 2 Cor. iv. 18. 

Twice during my summer ramblings I have 
succeeded, after a hard climb, in gaining the 
summit of Mt. Katahdin. I stood upon a lofty 
ridge of rock, on the one side of which there 
w^as a steep descent where one, had he slipped, 
could hardly have kept his footing ; and on the 
other side fell a sheer precipice, partially en- 
circling an abyss, in which the clouds boiled 
and surged, and the winds moaned through the 
vapors like the cries of lost souls. 

He who once succeeds in climbino; the heio'ht 
of evangelical truth up to which in the last 
sermon I tried to lead your thoughts, will be 
confident that he stands upon an everlasting 
foundation, exalted though he be above the 



84 DISCOURSES, 

clouds; and lie will be aware, also, of tlie dan- 
ger of losing firm footliold in the trutli, or of 
falling headlong into abysmal unbelief, if he 
ventures too carelessly and too far on either 
side. The Biblical truth of the nature of the 
Godhead, if we stand ujDon it, will preserve 
us, on the one hand, from plunging into 
utter scepticism, and, on the other hand, from 
descending into untenable views of divinity, 
at the bottom of which lies the hopeless 
jungle of pagan superstitions. So the evangeli- 
cal truth of the divine humanity keeps us, on 
the one side, from falling into sheer fatalism, 
and, on the other, from slipping into theories of 
human nature, which, though they seem at first 
lofty, nevertheless are sure in the end to land 
us in pessimism and despair. So in regard to 
Christian morality, one who stands upon the 
exalted doctrine of God's grace in Christ is pro- 
tected at once from lawlessness and license, and 
from worldliness and merely j^rudential virtue 
— the epicureanism down which the descent is 
easy into lowness and vice. 

But at this point I meet with another objec- 
tion to evangelical religion which shall serve as 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 85 

the stepping-stone to otir present reasoning. It 
is often said that evangelical theology appeals 
unduly to the hopes and fears of men, thereby 
producing a morality of mere policy. Men are 
urged to unite with the church in order that 
after death they may escape from hell. Now, 
so far as the objection made lies against the 
motives of some professed Christians, I would 
not care to interpose a word to break its force. 
Jesus himself rebuked the multitude who fol- 
lowed him for the sake of the loaves and fishes ; 
and I might appeal to the echoes which linger 
in our churches, the echoes which linger around 
the best orthodox pulpits, to prove that true 
evangelical religion makes its appeal to the 
noblest motives, to whatever is childlike in 
childhood, to whatever is womanly in woman- 
hood, to whatever is manly in manhood. 

But, if it still be urged that any appeal to 
men's hopes ;uid fears is unworthy a lofty 
morality, one curious fact of modern literature 
would of itself be enough to warrant me in 
calling a halt to this attack upon the church. 
The fact is, that this objection to Cliristian 
motives on account of what Herbert Spencer 



86 DISCOURSES, 

cleverly satirizes as their other-worldliness, and 
Jolin Stuart Mill regards as tlieir appeal to 
raere policy, has singularly enough been raised 
recently against Christianity by the two lead- 
ing representatives of that very morality which 
is based upon utility, or inherited experiences, 
at least, of utility; while, on the other hand, 
Jonathan Edwards, who used to make the very 
souls of men tremble by his intense pictures of 
the agonies of the lost, was the very theologian 
who worked out a theory of virtue so high 
and so disinterested that the chief apostle of 
scientific utilitarianism, Mr. Spencer, who can- 
not even ^'define virtue except in terms of 
happiness," fails to understand it, and mis- 
states it. 

The simple truth of the matter is, that evan- 
gelical theologians are the very thinkers who 
have exalted most highly the idea of immut* 
able moral distinctions, and the love of virtue 
for its own pure sake. Moreover, fear is a mo- 
tive w^hich is naturally and necessarily recog- 
nized in all government, in society, and even in 
the discipline of the home ; so that those who 
object to the use of these motives in religion 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 8/ 

might well be left, as Bishop Butler would say, 
to hold their dispute with the constitution and 
course of nature. 

The question really to be considered is not, 
should we be influenced by hope or fear? but, 
for what may we hope and of what ought we 
to be afraid ? In order, therefore, to deal satis- 
factorily with the doubts and difficulties of faith 
which are to be met with in this direction, we 
should enter into a full discussion of prevalent 
orthodox views of the future life: What, as 
generally held by evangelical churches now, 
what, as taught by really representative minds 
at the present time, are the orthodox views of 
the future life ? 

Let me remind you at the outset of this in- 
quiry that the difficulties which surround this 
subject, and which seem sometimes to rise up 
against the government of God himself — the 
shadows our earth in its history of sin seems to 
cast against the very glory of Heaven— are not 
the creation of Christianity. Revelation only 
serves to bring them out; they are difficulties 
wliich run down into the depths of the moral 
nature of things ; they are problems which lie 



88 DISCOURSES. 

back in the mystery of the creation of a moral 
universe. 

Around the second star in the sword-handle 
of Orion there is a remarkable nebula, which 
seems to hang in the skies like a bridal veil, its 
threads of white light woven into an infinite 
tracery, and through its folds stars sparkle and 
gleam; but this veil of light surrounds a spot 
in the sky of utter darkness. I have seen sen- 
sitive girls start back with a shudder from the 
telescope, as that veil of light flung across its 
field seemed to bring out, like a darkness that 
could be felt, the black sky within its folds. 
And often in the silence of the night, as I have 
gazed at that mystery of light and darkness in 
the skies, I have felt that I could form some 
conception of what Jesus meant when he spoke 
of the heavenly glory and the outer dark- 
ness. But the telescope through which I looked 
did not create that darkness, it only revealed 
it; and so the teaching of Jesus Christ only 
brings out the darkness which sometimes seems 
to be the deepest and most unutterable uj)on 
the very borders of celestial light and glory 

In wrestling with this confessedly difiicult 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 89 

and awful subject, one of the first things for us 
to endeavor to do will be to satisfy ourselves 
whether we can win any conception of the future 
life, particularly upon the retributive side of it, 
which shall relieve our perplexities, and enable 
us to bring into order and harmony all the 
analogies of experience, as well as the teachings 
of Scripture. I shall not weary you with a 
recital or discussion of those numerous theories 
of the future life which are at best only fanci- 
ful ; what we have to do is first to project upon 
the future, so far as we can, the lines of present 
experience. I shall review briefly several theo- 
ries which have been suggested, not without 
reason and support from analogy, and which 
have found some recognition within the pale of 
evangelical Christianity. 

First, there is the theory of annihilation, or 
conditional immortality. In one form of this 
theory it is held that the impenitent, those whose 
souls become in this life thoroughly wedded to 
the flesh, perish at death ; that immortality is 
not the natural right of the soul, but that it is a 
gift of God to man, made dependent upon his 
obedience to the will of God, and conditioned 



90 DISCOURSES. 

upon his sympathy with the character of God. 
Against this theory it has often and well been 
urged that it rests upon a literal and crass in- 
terpretation of the Scriptures ; that it contra- 
dicts a natural right to immortality whicJi would 
seem to be guaranteed by a faithful Creator in 
the very constitution of our nature ; and that it 
involves an imperfect and unworthy conception 
of the soul to which its Maker has delegated 
something of his own being, and in the very 
creation of which He has so far limited his own 
omnipotence, or placed it beyond his moral 
power, at least, to destroy it. 

I assume now the general belief in the im- 
mortality of the souL Your hearts are the 
witnesses for it; your memories are the pro- 
phets of it ; Christianity is the evidence of it, 
wrought into the very substance of history. 

It is urged, then, against this hypothesis of 
conditional immortality that it conflicts with 
this natural and inalienable rio;ht of the soul to 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, from 
age to age, and through all aeons — a right which 
would seem to have been granted by the Creator 
and secured in the verv constitution of the souL 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 



91 



There is, however, another form of this 
theory, which relieves somewhat the force of 
this argument from nature against it. It may 
be held that the soul does not go out of exist- 
ence at once when the body dies; but that, 
whether good or bad, it shall continue to be 
through other periods of duration until it is 
fully ripe for its final judgment; or that all 
souls must be supposed to continue, somewhere 
and somehow, in existence until the last great 
day, when all probation shall be finished ; and 
then, when this world-age shall be over, when 
the new heavens and the new earth shall ap- 
pear, then whatsoever is like God, whatsoever 
bears the image of Christ, shall be presented to 
the joy and glory of heaven's eternal King ; but 
that whatever is unlike God, every soul which, 
by a life of persistent sin, may have lost God's 
image and forfeited its native right to life and 
immortality, shall be destroyed from God's 
presence with an everlasting destruction.^ 

Tliis form of the theory of annihilation ap- 
parently relieves some perplexities of the dark 
problem of the future of evil ; but, after all, it 
only pushes the difficulty farther back. The 



92 DISCOURSES. 

real question is not. When will probation be 
over, when will the judgment come ? but, What 
is to be the final issue of evil in the creation of 
a good God? And annihilation by a fiat of 
God, and as a last resort of the Creator in deal- 
ing with sin, would seem like a confession of 
divine inability to overcome evil with good, 
rather than a final solution of the problem of 
evil in the perfect vindication of love. 

There is still another possible form of this 
theory, for which, as it seems to me, there 
might be found stronger supports from our 
present experience — a theory of partial and 
gradual annihilation. You have often noticed 
the power which an evil life has to dwarf and 
deaden the personality of a man. The process 
of creation was a process ever working upward 
—up from the dust of the earth to life ; up from 
living matter to the human brain, the very per- 
fection of the material creation ; up along the 
line of human history until at the head of the 
creation stands the God-man in the glory of the 
Father. The process of love is ever upward — • 
up from the pure child to the strong man or 
thoughtful woman ; up to the still more angelic 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 93 

grace and virtue of the spirits of the just made 
perfect. But the process of sin is ever down- 
ward, destroying all that is manly or womanly, 
extinguishing in the lusts of the flesh the light 
and glory of the soul. Our very words for 
sins are derived from the natures of the lower 
animals and the coarser characteristics of the 
material world. As the man enslaved by his 
appetites and passions sinks lower and lower, 
he seems to lose soul, to lose the power of 
discriminating between good and evil, and the 
capacity of entering into th^ enjoyments of 
a pure, happy home. The mark of the beast 
comes out upon his very countenance ; down 
even ^beneath the level of the brute creation 
does sin seem sometimes to sink the soul, even 
in this present world, until — utterly hard and 
coarse, a thing rather than a man — the drunk- 
ard, the debauchee, the criminal, meets the hour 
of his extinction. Now, suppose this course 
of degradation, so painfully and so repulsively 
obtruded upon us in some lives, to be carried 
on indefinitely; let this process of self-extinc- 
tion, of emptying the very personality, of de- 
stroying the soul, go on through ages of ages 



94 DISCOURSES. 

— and what would be left at last? What but 
the ashes of flames ? what but the graves of 
souls? what but the shades of immortal minds? 
what but a world which would be the insane 
asylum of the universe ? Is that what Jesus 
meant when he spoke of him who is able to 
destroy both soul and body in hell ? 

While, then, this theory of the gradual waste 
of personality and loss of soul does seem to 
carry out certain processes of moral consump- 
tion which we can see already begun in this 
world, and while it is justified by some very 
significant analogies of our present experience 
of the death which is the wages of sin, never- 
theless it does not comprehend within it'self all 
the lines of our experience, and still less does 
it comprise all the teachings of the Bible. Op- 
posed, therefore, to this conception, and sup- 
ported by some facts and moral reasonings 
which it leaves out of the account, we find a 
second general theory with regard to the ulti- 
mate condition of the impenitent — that of a 
final restoration, the restitution of all things. 
There is certainly much in our personal feel- 
ings to give wings to this thought of the final 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 95 

reconciliation of all things in Christ. There 
are many sentiments in our hearts which leap 
up at the very mention of this '^ eternal hope." 
Often, through the darkness of the mystery 
of evil, do we not long to see shining from 
afar a single star of hope? And it might 
be urged, from the conception which we have 
gained of the perfect God, that He never could 
give up the evil, never could give up the work 
of redemption, until sin's last contradiction of 
his own glory should be turned to praise, until 
at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, 
not in fear, but to the glory of the Father. 
So this hope of final reconciliation of all things 
in Christ, dim and vague though it be, has been 
cherished within their sterner creed by not a 
few Christian hearts, and has been* avowed and 
defended by some evangelical scholars. But 
comforting as this hope may seem to be, com- 
prehensive as it is of many analogies and moral 
experiences, supported, also, as it appears to 
be, by some hints contained in expressions of 
the apostle Paul, nevertheless it is suiTouiuhul 
with difficulties; it fails to take up into itself 
all moral facts, and leads into fiwsli perplexities 



g6 DISCOURSES, 

and doubts. There are lines of present experi- 
ence which seem to run the other way, and can- 
not easily, even in our imaginations of the 
future, be bent around in the direction of this 
hope. There are souls now living which seem 
to grow less and less human, more and more 
Satanic, even under increasing light. There are 
lives which, so far as we can judge from the 
little arc of them to be measured upon this 
earth — like a parabola whose curve, if prolonged 
into infinity, would never return into itself — 
seem to recede ever farther and farther from 
the light and the love of God. Their direction 
is toward the outer darkness. Besides this 
painfully evident, unmistakable tendency of sin, 
we cannot overlook the argument for the future 
permanence of moral character from the analogy 
of the present hardness of habit. Human nature 
tends to become fixed in formed growths and 
tenacious habits; the heart seems to possess 
sometimes a fatal facility of hardening itself 
against the purest influences even of the best 
homes. And while there are some passages of 
Scripture which seem to warrant the hope of 
final reconciliation, if they are interpreted as 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 97 

literally as are the texts usually relied upon to 
prove the endlessness of punishment, there are 
other passages of Scripture which it would be 
difficult to bend into this theory. 

What relief, then, can I find from the diffi- 
culties under which the heart bows, as under an 
incubus, when I think of future retribution? 
Is there any clear way of thought out from the 
perplexities which confessedly surround this 
subject on every side? Each theory which we 
have thus far tried, promises to the heart more 
than it can fulfil to the reason, and is found at 
last to lead no whither. 

I turn again to the Scriptures, but I cannot 
find that I am able, even after every effort, to 
combine all their teachings and suggestions 
naturally, without any artifice of interpretation, 
into any one clear and determinate picture of 
the future life and its rewards and punishments. 
Rather I see many of these teachings as one 
miglit see the colors of a painter on his palette ; 
tliey are all true colors, they all will l)e needed ; 
doubtless they are complementary colors ; but I 
do not now, at least, see them combined and 
harmonized as I shall h()])o to do ^vIlcn ilu^ 
5 



98 DISCOURSES. 

divine Idealist shall have finislied his picture of 
human history, and it shall be unveiled at last, 
in that day of revelation, ready for the judg- 
ment. I cannot say that these Scriptural teach- 
ings and hints concerning the future are contra- 
dictory ; I cannot say that these divergent lines 
of human experience shall never find a common 
meeting point ; I can only say that I, a mere 
child of yesterday, with all the mystery of the 
infinite skies above me, with this earth of 
sepulchres beneath me, with this heart crying 
out for the living God of love within me, yet 
with this eye of reason compelled to see the 
facts of sin, and penalty, and death — I cannot 
reconcile all difiiculties which I must feel and 
learn ; I do not have the knowledge by means 
of which these conflicting analogies of experi- 
ence may be brought to their point of stable 
union, and all these teachings of the Bible be 
made clear and plain. 

What, then, should we do ? What, as ortho- 
dox theologians who would be true to God and 
to his Word, who would obey the Scriptures 
and hold the Bible above creed, what are we 
to think, what are we to teach ? 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 99 

It is first a word of humility wMcli the ortho- 
dox theology of to-day should utter upon this 
subject — a word of lowly -mindedness which 
every earnest man who has wrestled with this 
subject will first wish to speak. 

I have thus far been bringing but a negative 
to your consideration. I have felt it necessary 
to begin by proving this negative, by showing 
our incapacity at present to form any perfect, 
comprehensive theory of the future life and the 
final issues of evil, because we are too inclined 
to demand more both of conscience and revela- 
tion than it was ever intended that they should 
make known to us in this present world-age. 
While we should seek to be wise up to that 
which is written, we should not desire to be 
wise beyond that which is written. I want a 
creed covering the Bible, but not a creed over- 
lapping the Bible. It seems to me, therefore, 
that after having first satisfied ourselves that in 
no one theory or conception, heretical or ortlio- 
doxistical, can we solve the mystery of evil, 
past, present, or to come, we need, then, to turn 
back and examine tliis whole doctrine of the 
future life in the same light in which our best 



lOO DISCOURSES. 

Christian scholarship now searches other teach- 
ings of the Scriptures ; to bring to this part of 
the Bible the same broad principles of interpre- 
tation which are enabling us so successfully to 
find our way above many popular objections 
against revealed religion, and which to many 
tried minds have placed the great faiths of 
Christianity above reproach and beyond con- 
tradiction. 

The next thing, therefore, for us to do, will 
be to seek for the purpose of revelation in its 
partial disclosures and intimations of the future 
life of rewards and punishments. We shall 
need to mark with painstaking care, also, the 
limits of revelation ; and upon this whole sub- 
ject, perhaps, more than upon any other, ortho- 
doxy needs to avail itself of what might be 
called the statute of limitations in theology. 
We must determine, if we can, what parts of 
this doctrine are purposely left in obscurity, 
and what parts are brought out into the clear 
light of revelation — for it is a happy and too 
rare art in religious thinking to be able to locate 
mysteries wisely and well ; — rand, then, having 
located the mysteries of retribution, we may be 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, lol 

able, as we read the Scriptures, to gain for our- 
selves some very practical and urgent truths 
concerning heaven and hell. That sturdy ques- 
tioner, Mr. Greg, urges very pertinently that 
the common theology does not so appeal to the 
hopes, and so lay hold of the fears of men, as to 
bring to bear a direct and powerful influence 
upon the present conduct of life. What ortho- 
doxy now should seek to accomplish, is to put 
its doctrine of retribution into such a relation 
to the thoughts, the studies, the pursuits, of the 
men of this generation, that they shall be com- 
pelled to feel its force, and to be swayed in 
their real lives by its power. But we cannot 
do this simply by repeating the old words, or 
reviving the reasonings of a former generation. 
The very word hell has become all too inopera- 
tive and inefficient — a word useful for men to 
swear by; and we greatly need, as orthodox 
theologians we should earnestly endeavor, to 
bring to bear upon this present world, upon the 
passions, the conduct, the pursuits of this life, 
the power, the grand, majestic power, of the 
world to come. 

If men were made to realize tlie power of the 



I02 DISCOURSES. 

eternal life, as Jesus and his disciples preached 
it, then the great practical purpose and intent 
of revelation would be gained. But you will 
sometimes hear the sentiment expressed and ap- 
plauded, as though it were a moral truth, '' Give 
us one world at a time, and when we reach the 
other side of Jordan we will attend to the next 
world." Xo popular sophism could be more 
misleading or despicable. It is simply imj)os- 
sible for us to have one world at a time. Go 
home to your children and tell them, if you 
please, to have their school-days for themselves 
alone, without any reference to the life before 
them; try, if you please, to have this life in 
isolated sections, childhood in its place, then 
youth, manhood, and old age, each for itself; 
but do not be so foolish, so stupid, nay, do not 
be so impious, as to dare to go into your closet 
and look your Maker in the eye, and tell Him 
you will take the present world and do with it 
what you please, and by and hj have the future ! 
The future is always in the present, and what- 
soever a man soweth that shall he also reap. 

But this sophism involves more than a moral 
impossibility. My illustration does not present 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 103 

the whole fallacy of it. It is also a natural 
as well as moral impossibility for us to have one 
world at a time ; for, as matter of fact, in every 
thought that we think, in every breath which 
we draw, in every beating of our hearts, we are 
living all the while in two worlds ; we are liv- 
ing a two-fold life — we are dwelling amid the 
forms of things which are seen and passing, and 
with the realities which are spiritual and 
which cannot pass away. Two worlds are ours 
— this world of shadows, this world of echoes, 
this world of strange and unsubstantial forms, 
which often seems to us to be the only reality ; 
and that other, better world, unseen but not 
unreal, untouched but not unknown, the world 
of thought, the world of love, the world of the 
soul dwelling in the light of spiritual truth and 
divine reality. Take this earth out of the skies 
in which it lies ensphered — take the soul out of 
the body — take love out of the heart and 
thought out of the brain — if you would live in 
one world at a time ! Orthodoxy at least does 
this — with unhesitating and constant voice 
evangelical preaching asserts this — that the 
future life is vitally related to the present life; 



I04 DISCOURSES. 

that tlie unseen universe holds within its laro^er 
sphere the world which is seen ; that the one 
universe comprehends both, comprehends all — 
not simply the starry skies, but also the heavens 
in which God dwells — not merely this little 
earth and its visible horizons, but also that 
world of power, beauty, truth, and eternal rest- 
fulness, in which this present life, with all its 
joys and sorrows, all its lights and shadows, 
lies ensphered, as the earth is upheld quietly 
and powerfully in the all-encompassing sky. 

But while orthodoxy asserts, thus, the im- 
mediate organic relation between this life and 
its future, and while evangelical preaching is 
burdened, therefore, Avith the thought of the 
unseen and the eternal as well as with the care for 
the present; a humble and earnest theology 
will be willing to wait for the day of revelation 
to make known the mysteries which still lie 
like shadows over its own faith. When the 
voice of God ceases to speak, silence becomes 
the only orthodoxy. Our evangelical theology 
would enter into the mystery and darkness of 
this truth in the spirit of the little child who, 
when asked, as the railway train swept into a 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE. 105 

tunnel, if she were not afraid, replied, '^ Afraid ! 
No, God sees." Yes, God sees ! through, the 
darkness, through the deep shadow of our 
history of sin God sees ! and evangelical faith, 
while it will not deny the night-side of nature, 
while it will not dispute one single awful word 
of Jesus concerning the day of judgment, will 
still believe in God, and wait — its heart is not 
troubled, neither is it afraid. We remember 
that the Master was not troubled, that Jesus was 
not afraid for God, as he looked on to the end of 
the world-ages ; that he who spake the strongest 
words of condemnation of sin which have ever 
fallen upon human ears — he who possessed the 
power of perfect manly indignation, but who 
was, nevertheless, compassionate with a love 
passing the love of woman — even when he 
was enshrouded in all the darkness of our sin, 
never doubted the Father's goodness ; he knew 
that whatever the future might be, God would 
])e there — God would be there in the perfect- 
ness of his beauty and his love — and where 
God is, there no wrong can be done forever ! 
Thus Jesus Christ, whose eyes, even while dim 
with tears of anguish for our sins^ looked fai** 

5* 



Io6 DISCOURSES. 

ther into tlie future than any human eyes have 
ever seen — who even while gathering around 
him the heavy folds of darkness of our sin and 
sorrow, for the joy set before him endured the 
cross, despising the shame — he, the one perfect, 
the true revelation of God, knew that eternity 
would disclose nothing which should not justify 
and glorify the ways of God, and show that 
upon the throne of the universe Love, infinite, 
pure, and righteous. Love that can make no 
mistakes, is Lord and King. 

In concluding this preliminary discourse upon 
the orthodox doctrine of the future life, let me 
remind you that to our Lord and his disciples 
the hour of the great change for us is not the 
hour when the eye grows dim, and the sound of 
friendly voices becomes far off and unreal in 
death; but that hour when God comes near, 
and the eyes of the spiritual understanding 
being opened, the soul sees how beautiful God 
is, and how hateful sin is ; that hour when the 
^vill of self is crucified, and the God-will is 
born in the resolutions of the new heart. Oh ! 
that is the passing from death unto life, the great 
change in the history of a soul of which what 



IMPERFECT THEORIES OF FUTURE LIFE, 107 

we call life and death are in Jesus' language 
only the metaphors. By whatever influences 
that spiritual change may be brought to pass, 
suddenly as by a lightning-flash of conviction, 
or gradually and beautifully as the brightening 
of the dawn; through whatever processes of 
experience and grace the soul may be led up to 
its hour before God; the crisis of its Avhole age- 
long history is its decision between a life grow- 
ing rich unto God, or starving upon self — its 
real final choice between the true, the eternal 
life, or the eternal death of the heart. 



^ 



V. 



NEGATIVE Al^jy POSITIVE ELEMEITTS IN THE CON- 
CEPTION OF THE EUTURE LIFE. 

Whom we preach, wamiog every man, and teaching every man 
in all wisdom ; that we may present every man perfect in Christ 
Jesus.-— Col. i. 28. 

Disbelievers in revelation seem sometimes 
to suppose tliat if they could succeed in dethron- 
ing the Bible from its place in the Christian 
church, they would succeed, also, in consigning 
the belief in a future life of rewards and pun- 
ishments to the limbo of old and out-worn 
superstitions. A friend of Voltaire once wrote 
to him : '' I have succeeded in getting rid of the 
idea of hell." Voltaire replied, ''Allow me to 
congratulate you; I am very far from that." A 
keen-sighted intellect, like Voltaire's, could 
hardly stumble into the delusion into which 
some of our lecturers against Moses and the 
Bible seem to fall so readily, that if Chris- 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 109 

tianity could be destroyed, we should lose from 
the sanctities of conscience man's natural and 
ineradicable belief in future retribution. Our 
faith in future rewards and punishments is in- 
stinctive and primary ; our doubt is secondary 
and contrary to nature. Only when we endeavor 
to conceive what the future life is like, to form 
8ome intelligible ideas of what its occupations 
and enjoyments may be, do doubts rise un- 
avoidably, and perplexities begin to overgrow 
hope, and we feel as if the faith in immortality 
were almost too great a truth for the human 
intellect to contain. 

Evidently the hour has gone by for the 
child's picture-book of heaven and hell. Yet 
we may still carry God's own promise of heaven 
— if no longer before us as a pictured glory — at 
least, and possibly to better purpose, within us, 
in the pure affections of our own hearts. And 
even while we turn from all outward represen- 
tations of the judgment-day, we may still keep 
the awe of it in our own consciences, and find 
the living prophecy of it in the moral separa- 
tions and destinies of the men among whom we 
dwell. 



no DISCOURSES. 

Having already shown how difficult it is to 
form any one conception of the world to come 
and its issues, which shall be inclusive of all 
the Scriptures, and comprehensive of all moral 
truths and analogies, I have now to push the 
inquiry a little farther, and perhaps to some 
more positive results, in the direction indicated 
toward the close of the last discourse. Let us 
seek to determine the purpose of revelation in 
making known to us what it has disclosed con- 
cerning the future, and in withholding what it 
has left in obscurity. 

Observe, then, these suggestive facts concern- 
ing the aim and method of revelation in its 
teaching with regard to these matters. Notice 
that the Scriptures relating to the future life 
occupy but a comparatively small part of the 
whole Word of God. One might print upon 
fifteen or twenty pages all important texts 
which throw any light upon our future ex- 
istence; what we might expect would be the 
major part of revelation is the minor part of 
our Bible. 

Observe, again, even this partial revelation 
was given little by little; the doctrine of im- 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. \ \ \ 

mortality was gradually unfolded. In tlie Old 
Testament, trial and suffering, and the disap- 
pointment of the national hopes, were necessary 
in order that through the darkness the star of 
hope might at length break forth and shine 
bright and clear. And we find that Jesus be- 
gan his gospel of the kingdom of heaven by 
putting his teaching into the forms of prevalent 
Jewish conceptions, gradually leading his dis- 
ciples out and up into higher and purer ideas, 
until, just before his departure, in that upper 
chamber, he gave them his last and richest word, 
his fullest revelation, concerning the eternal life 
which he promised, when he prayed the Father 
that ^' they all may be one as we are one ; " when 
he made no visible splendors, or glory of out- 
ward things, the imagery of his kingdom ; but 
when he made human friendship, when he made 
perfect and divine companionship, the prophecy 
and assurance to his disciples of what the 
heavenly life shall be. 

You will observe further, not only that the 
Biblical teaching is progressive, but also that 
those very disciples to whom the fullest revela- 
tions were given were most conscious that they 



112 DISCOURSES. 

propliesied in part, and tliat the heart of man 
cannot conceive of the glory which shall be re- 
vealed. Revelation, then, even at its highest 
and its best, is but in part. Revelation began 
with a promise and ended with a sunset ; but 
those disciples .who stood at the close of this 
day of the Lord, gazing into the glory of that 
Apocalypse, did not attempt to fix in their 
gospel the colors of that sunset, to portray in 
definite hues and determinate forms the glory 
which it transcends the power of human imagi- 
nation to conceive. 

It is very evident, therefore, that the object 
of revelation in these partial disclosures of the 
futm'e life, could not have been to gratify hu- 
man curiosity, or to answer those many ques- 
tions which our hearts are always asking. 

But let us look a little deeper and farther. 
You will observe that the Bible, in all its teach- 
ing concerning the world to come, carefully 
keeps within certain general limits of revela- 
tion. These limits are in j)art limits of nature, 
determined by the range of our powers in their 
present stage of development. 

This necessary natural limitation of revela- 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 



113 



tion may be illustrated by reference to a sup- 
posed process of formation of the eye, and its 
increasing power of vision. It is imagined by 
some scientists that the eye was at first in some 
lower organism a mere susceptibility to rays of 
light — some spot in the nerve-tissue becomes 
capable of responding to the beatings of the 
luminif erous waves. Now, if we should suppose 
an intelligence possessed of that mere germ of 
an eye, such a being might rightly conclude 
from its germinal sensations of light that there 
must be beyond itself some larger and wonder- 
ful sphere of existence. But, though all the 
colors of a sunset had been spread before it, 
that beginning of an eye could not have been 
sensitive to their resplendent hues, and the rev- 
elation of light would have found a limit in the 
imperfection of the eye. Suppose it, then, to 
have been carried to a still higher development, 
to have become sensitive to marked differences 
of color, but to be as yet without percep- 
tion of distance, or depths of perspective, its 
apprehension of the external world not yet co- 
ordinated with the knowledge to be gained by 
touch and the other senses, — then there would 



114 DISCOURSES. 

be still at that stage of the evolution of sight 
corresponding limitations of the revelation of 
light to it. Now, I say, that our eyes for spir- 
itual things may be, as it were, but eyes in the 
germ; — from what we do feel, from the heavenly 
influeuces which do beat upon our spirits, we 
are warranted in assuming that there is a larger 
sphere of being, there is a more glorious uni- 
verse still to be revealed, into whose splendors 
as yet we have no power to look and live ; but 
though that unseen world may be shining all 
around us, revelation finds a necessary limit of 
its light in the present conditions and imper- 
fections of our powers of spiritual apprehen- 
sion. 

Besides these natural limitations of possible 
revelations, there are limitations, also, of moral 
purpose and design. There may be possible 
revelations which God might give to us even 
here and now, but which it might not be best 
for us to receive. We have a significant illus- 
tration of the harm which might be done 
through overmuch revelation, in the imaginary 
disclosures of modern spiritualism; overmuch 
revelation might interfere seriously with the 



NEGA TIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 1 1 5 

natural course of human life, with the regular 
order of those pursuits and employments which 
are the appointed discipline of this life, and in 
which, through patient continuance in them, we 
are to work out our powers for enlarged and 
happier spheres of existence ; so that doubtless 
God has judged for us, and with a wisdom be- 
yond ours, between a revelation adapted to our 
present education, practical and useful for us 
now, and overmuch revelation altogether be- 
yond our present moral verification of it — a 
revelation whose brightness might dazzle the 
eye; whose very power and glory might cause 
the intellect to reel, and make the reason lose 
its self-possession, overcome by the supernal 
vision. Too bright, as well as too dark, a reve- 
lation might defeat the very objects of revela- 
tion. When faith shall be lost in sight the day 
of probation may be over. Would not the 
perfect vision of God be the final judgment of 
character? 

Keeping in mind, then, these natural and 
moral limitations of revelation, let us now take 
one step farther, and seek to understand what 
parts of the doctrine of the future are left in ob- 



Il6 DISCOURSES. 

scurity, purposely left, it may be, in the shadows 
of revelation. 

I sliall mention three elements of this doc- 
trine which, it seems to me, both reason and 
the Bible leave in the shadow — and in the 
shadow it is wisdom for our hearts to be will- 
ing for the present to leave them. 

The first of these obscure elements of this doc- 
trine is the relation of our future life to space. 
Space is a metaphysical idea. You may all 
imagine that you know what space is ; but the 
nature of space and its relation to the thinking 
mind constitute one of the old, perpetually re- 
curring, and unsolved problems of metaphysics. 
The Bible does not commit the fatal mistake of 
entrusting its truth of immortality to any human 
imagination of the relation of the future life to 
space. Suppose Jesus had attempted to make 
the Jews of his day understand where heaven 
is — to teach his disciples the particular direc- 
tion and position of the place which he was to 
prepare for them. They possessed a knowl- 
edge of the universe too limited and beggarly 
to render it possible for them to have gained a 
conception of where heaven may be which our 



NEGA TIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, \ 1 7 

larger science miglit not now laugh to scorn ; 
and Jesus did not try to instruct them beyond 
their age and capacity, but was content to tell 
them, ^' I have yet many things to say unto you, 
but ye cannot bear them now," ''Thou shalt 
know hereafter." Or, suppose that inspiration 
had given to Moses and the prophets some such 
view of the future life in its relation to the 
present system of things as the authors of the 
''Unseen Universe," for example, hold to be an 
admissible scientific speculation, in harmony with 
our present knowledge of the universe ; such a 
revelation would have been utterly unintel- 
ligible and practically useless to the Jews of 
old ; and so, possibly, a revelation expressed 
in the terms of modern science, in twenty-five 
or a hundred years from now, might appear as 
mere guess-work to those who at that time 
shall have peered farther into the mysteries of 
creation. One added sense miglit open to our 
view worlds of heavenly felicity ; some in- 
creased development even of these poor and 
limited senses might enable us to answer ques- 
tions before which now our wisest science nuist 
stand dumb. When you can tell mo the rela- 



Il8 DISCOURSES. 

tion of your mind to your body ; when you can 
locate in the brain or heart the thought which 
you are now thinking; when you can locate 
human affections in the body — those affections 
which, though we know of no cell of matter 
which is their local habitation, are neverthe- 
less real and abiding, if anything in this world 
is abiding; — then you may be warranted in 
finding trouble with the Bible on account of its 
silence concerning the place of heaven; then 
you may require Christian theology to answer, 
where is heaven ; but not until you can locate 
the human soul in the body, need you be dis- 
turbed about the failure of the Bible to locate 
heaven in the universe, or anxious about the 
relation of the world to come to astronomy. 

Again, the relation of the next life to time is 
left in the shadow of our present ignorance. 
Time, like space, is a metaphysical problem. 
What we call time, indeed, is a rate of motion 
to which our present vital processes have been 
adapted, and to which we have become habitu- 
ated. It is easy for us to conceive that this 
rate may be different for different worlds; 
that within the limits of the sidereal system 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 119 

one day in one star, in comparison with the 
revolutions of other stars, may be as a thousand 
years. Time is accordingly a relative concep- 
tion, not the same thing perhaps for the insects 
of a summer's day as for man in his life of 
three score years and ten. It changes with the 
more slow or more rapid pulsations of life in 
the animate creation; and of what absolute 
time or eternity may be we have no adequate 
conception. Eternity is an order of existence 
to which our present pulses of life have not 
been made to beat, and into which our souls 
while tabernacling in this mortality are not yet 
introduced. These words, the infinite, the 
eternal, are by no means meaningless to us 
now ; they do express to us, at least, the spirit's 
native sense of its own birth into a higher 
order of existence than can be seen, or marked 
by the successions of outward nature. These 
words are not utter blanks, they are the spirit's 
assertion of something more than the finite 
and the temporal, the sense and joy of whicli 
cannot be taken from it; but these words of 
spiritual suggestion cannot be brought down to 
the definitions of the understanding, they 



120 DISCOURSES. 

transcend all tliouglit. Let us not forget that 
the very word over which faith and despair 
raise so hot a contention is a word incapable of 
definition, and suggestive of an order of exist- 
ence utterly beyond the realization of the hu- 
man imagination. Part, at least, of the 
difficulty in the ordinary discussions of the 
doctrine of eternal punishment is due to our 
confusion of the difference between the two 
kinds or modes of existence indicated by the 
words, the temporal and the eternal, and our 
attempt to conceive of the one in terms of the 
other. But this confusion of terms is mthout 
warrant either in reason or Scripture. The 
Bible nowhere attempts to represent eternity 
by a succession of periods of time indefinitely 
prolonged. Scholars frequently dispute con- 
cerning the meaning of those Greek adjectives 
by which Jesus characterized real life and 
death; whether they mean endless, or for 
ages of ages; everlasting, or for some period of 
dm^ation ; forever, or as long as the object to 
which they are applied has its natural con- 
tinuance. But it is enough for me to know that 
Jesus used these adjectives to impress men with 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 12 1 

the vast, unspeakable difference between the 
true life and sin in their divergent moral desti- 
nies ; yet he never sought to define the mean- 
ing of these words; he left them indetermin- 
ate, as they must be, to the understanding — 
words of great suggestion, but not to be 
measured by us in any terms of duration. 
Jesus taught plainly that men are deciding 
here and now between life and death, and he 
used the strongest adjectives of human speech 
to indicate the absolute moral difference in this 
world, and in the world to come, between those 
two states; but he did not endeavor to depict 
before the imagination of his hearers the pos- 
sible length of duration of the future life ; he 
did not gather together the years, and lieap up 
ages upon ages, in order that by a mere human 
imagination of time indefinitely expanded and 
prolonged he might appall them, and for aught 
we know utterly mislead them as to what the 
reality of the eternal existence shall be — that 
final state of existence when the angel shall 
proclaim that time shall be no longer. There 
is absolutely no justification in Scripture for 
the crude metaphysics, the vain and painful 



122 DISCOURSES. 

fiction, of tlie once too customary theological 
massing of times and multiplication of the 
ageSj to represent the thought of Jesus in his 
solemn words, tremulous with meanings beyond 
meanings — eternal life, eternal sin. I accept 
these words of Jesus as he uttered them, but 
not as they have often been misunderstood and 
overburdened with human definitions and vain 
imaginations. Jesus, as I cannot but think, 
purposely left this side of his doctrine in awful 
indefiniteness, knowing that we are not capable 
of receiving more than intimations of the here- 
after. I accept with implicit faith these fear- 
ful sayings of our Lord, but I will not forget 
that he remembered our ignorance when he 
used them, and that his adjectives represent 
what to a large extent must remain the un- 
known quantities in the as yet unfinished 
problem of good and evil ; and I deny, there- 
fore, the Christian right of any theology, or any 
church, to trouble me with difficulties beyond 
the grasp of my understanding, drawn from 
that portion of revelation which is left in ob- 
scurity ; or to disturb and confuse my faith in 
those truths of eternal life and eternal sin of 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 123 

wHcli I can now have some comprehension, and 
gain some verification in my present experience, 
by bringing to me questions, or dark heart-de- 
vouring doubts, which may be drawn forth by 
a remorseless logic from the shadows of the 
mysteries of God's wisdom in which Jesus, with 
a finer human instinct as well as diviner com- 
passion for our weakness of faith and littleness 
of knowledge, chose to leave them undisturbed. 
Then there is a third truth which seems to 
be left in the shadows of the Gospel of the 
kingdom ; and that is the nature and intent of 
the divine administration of Hades — the place 
of departed spirits — from the time the dying 
leave the present world until the judgment day.''^ 
There is a period of life after death and before 
that last, great day when this world-age shall 
be over, of which the Bible gives us some intima- 
tion, but concerning which it aficords no distinct 
revelation. It does tell us something concern- 
ing that intermediate state ; enough, at least, to 
assure us that it shall not prove to be a loss of 
consciousness, and purposeless sleep of ages for 
souls awaiting the great day of awakening. 
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is 



124 DISCOURSES. 

sufficient to dispel this thonglit of an inter- 
mediate suspension of activities among the 
waiting dead — a' supposition which would he, 
indeed, alike unworthy of the soul and of God's 
resources for its continued growth and perfect- 
ing. But the Bible only yields hints enough 
concerning God's purposes in Hades to show ns 
how much there is still to be communicated to 
"US, and to prevent us meanwhile from dogmatiz- 
ing overmuch upon this whole subject of the final 
destiny of the departed. There are those pas- 
sages which speak of Jesus' descent into Hades, 
and of his preaching to the dead, to a class of 
souls represented as being in prison; and we 
should interpret these passages by the same rules 
which govern us in the interpretation of other 
Scriptures. It will not do for us to take literally 
some texts concerning the final state of the im- 
penitent, and then to accommodate to them 
these obscure passages ; it would be fairer and 
wiser to admit that they may be intimations of 
some truths now missing in our doctrine of 
eternal punishment, and for the lack of which, 
if we choose to put aside utterly these hints and 
to forget our own ignorance, our very faith in 



NEGA TIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. \ 2 5 

God's justice and mercy may suffer harm. I 
will not allow myself, by any dogmatic bias, to 
strain or warp the meaning of any of these 
doubtful or apparently conflicting passages of 
Scripture. If I cannot understand exactly what 
they do mean, I can at least refrain from put- 
ting my own meanings into them. These texts, 
and certain glowing passages in which St. Paul 
speaks of the final completion of Christ's king- 
dom, do not teach explicitly a second probation, 
or mean without doubt that there shall be a 
final reconciliation of evil to God ; they do not 
alter the fact that the burden of the Scriptures 
is the utter urgency of a right moral decision 
now before the Cross, and they hold up no 
promise of the hereafter to any man who here 
and now determines himself against the Spirit 
of Christ ; yet so long as such expressions have 
been left in the Bible, our theology ouglit, at 
least, not to be over-confident that it has learned 
the whole mind of the Spirit concerning God's 
work and purpose in the interval — we know not 
how long it may be — between death and the final 
judgment ; and these Scriptures are sufiicient to 
give us a needed, though too often overlooked, 



126 DISCOURSES. 

intimation tliat the Lord lias his own adminis- 
tration of the regions of the dead until the Mes- 
sianic kingdom shall be delivered up to the 
Father ; and of what the Father and the Christ 
are working there we need to know far more 
than has been disclosed to us before we are 
competent to judge the ways of God to men, 
or have reason to doubt that the awards of the 
last great assize shall be in accordance with 
truth, justice, and mercy. I feel that I have a 
moral right — a right guaranteed by these 
Scriptures — to take refuge from the perplexi- 
ties of the final issues of evil in my own igno- 
rance and in the silence of God's Word ; to find 
peace, comfort, and hope in the merciful ob- 
scurities of revelation. It is hard, indeed, for 
us to imagine how the processes of life can at 
any point be brought to a sudden halt ; how 
the mere accident of death — for death is only an 
accidental circumstance, not an iuAvard change 
— can fit an untrained and unchastened Chris- 
tian for the pure vision of the supernal glory. 
All the analogies of experience would seem to 
compel us to believe that disciplinary processes 
of life must be continued after death ; and in 




NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 



127 



this intermediate period, suggested by some 
Scriptures, room would be found for tlie play 
of those forces of moral development whose 
working we observe in the present life. Not, 
then, until the day of revelation shall disclose 
to our eyes the secrets of Hades, are we war- 
ranted in raising one question of our troubled 
understandings, or one doubt of our beating 
hearts, concerning the just judgments of God 
in eternity. 

The reformers found in their day that this 
half -revealed truth of the intermediate life had 
developed into the overgrown and corrupt 
doctrine of purgatory — a doctrine saturated 
through and through with the poison of meri- 
torious works and penance; and rightly, there- 
fore, the reformers laid the axe at the root of 
the tree, and cut down the whole deadly doc- 
trine. But back in the minds of the Christian 
fathers had been simpler ideas of moral purifi- 
cation which had grown into that corrupt Papal 
teaching; and back still in Scriptural ground 
may lie, perhaps, the germs of a better doctrine 
of an intermediate life, and its processes of j)uri- 
fication and perfecting, which it may remain 



128 DISCOURSES. 

for our Protestant theology more carefully to 
discriminate, and to cultivate, for the healing 
of many souls now bruised and wounded by 
too bare and crushing dogmatism ^ I do not 
know — I speak now not for orthodoxy, I speak 
only for myself — but I have often been disposed 
to question as not in accordance with the truest 
instincts of hearts under the illumination of the 
Spirit of Christ, and as alien to an older and 
better faith, traces of which are to be found in 
the liturgies of the early church, that Protestant 
tradition — for it is only a Protestant tradition — 
which, while it permits us through all the days 
of our friend's lives to l^ear ever upon our hearts 
before God those who are near to us, and dearer 
than life, forbids us, the moment after the acci- 
dent of death has happened to them, to mention 
before the God of the living the names which 
for years have always been remembered in our 
prayers ^. 

So much, then, should be said of those ele- 
ments of this doctrine which are left in the ob- 
scurities of revelation ; and when we once suc- 
ceed in locating much that is mysterious, and in 
determining wisely what we are not yet able to 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 



129 



know, or ought not to expect now to be taught 
of God ; then, if I am not greatly mistaken, we 
shall find our faith happily delivered from the 
burden of many difficulties, which, if we try to 
carry them, will surely oppress our reason and 
bruise our hearts. 

But now I wish to look at those portions of 
this doctrine upon which the light of revelation 
does seem to fall. What parts of this truth, in 
its whole extent too great for us, are brought 
down to the grasp of our reason and conscience ? 
What lines of it can we follow and verify in our 
present moral experience ? 

The first truth of the doctrine of future retri- 
bution, which is now verifiable in part, at least, 
is this : God in eternity, and for eternity, shall 
judge every man according to his real, fully- 
determined character — not according to the 
appearance, not according to the profession, 
nor yet in accordance with any interrupted and 
incomplete determination of character — but ac- 
cording to the true and final reality of liis being. 
Wherever, whenever, however, that judgment 
shall be pronounced, or executed, it shall be a 

discrimination of characters according to their 
6* 



I30 DISCOURSES. 

inmost truth and final possibilities. This abso- 
lute moral truth of God's eternal judgments is 
so firmly declared in the Scriptures, and appeals 
so directly and powerfully to the moral reason, 
that I will not take time in discussing the evi- 
dence of it, but will simply state it and affirm it. 
Again, the Bible, as it seems to me, does turn 
to the light in which our human reason may 
see this truth of the doctrine of retribution : real 
and final judgment of character is a judgment 
based upon, and determined by, the relation of 
the heart of man to God. The decisive test of 
character, beyond which there can be no other, 
is the relation of the life to the living God. 
This is the only comprehensive judgment of a 
moral agent; all other means of judgment, all 
other relations in which men may be judged, 
are but partial. You cannot know fully and 
finally what a man is by observing him in his 
relation to his neighbor, his parents, or his 
family ; one man may be a good father, a faith- 
ful husband, a kind neighbor, and yet be utterly 
dishonest in his business; while another man 
may be strictly honorable in all his business 
transactions, and yet a disgrace to the very 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 131 

name of man in his home. There is no human 
relation which is not partial; which encloses 
manhood or womanhood on all sides, and which 
can, therefore, be the means of a comprehen- 
sive judgment of character; nor can all these 
relations together give the full measure of a 
man. But God is all in all ; and in the relation 
of the soul to the God who made it, all these 
human relationships are summed up and in- 
cluded, and its whole life may, therefore, be 
judged. If the heart be really good toward 
God, it will not be bad toward any created 
thing. What a man is toward his God, that he 
is in his heart ; that he is in the reality of his 
character. Hence there shall come at the end 
of time a day when God shall be seen to be 
all in all, and when our whole human history 
shall be brought for its last judgment under the 
light of perfectly manifested divinity ; when as 
the souls of men shall be found in sympathy with 
God, or sliall be pierced by the beams of tlie 
ineffable holiness, as they shall be drawn by a 
sweet and resistless attraction to tlie very 
throne of grace, or as tliey shall be repelled by 
the evil magnetism of their own sinful desires 



132 DISCOURSES. 

away from the One central Light and Glory, 
they shall find every man his own place — and 
it may be the mercy in the justice of God which 
shall suffer every man to find his own place — • 
in the heavenly light, or in what Jesus calls the 
outer darkness. 

There is a third and most important element 
of this doctrine upon which the Scripture sheds 
some light, and which appeals directly to our 
moral reason, viz. : There shall be differences of 
degrees in the rewards and punishments of the 
future life. Heaven is not one vast celestial 
communism. But this Scriptural and rational 
truth of distinctions in glory and differences of 
blessino;s hereafter seems to have fallen almost 
into disuse in our current Protestant theology ; 
yet it was a church father who said that the per- 
son who denies degrees in rewards and punish- 
ments is a heretic. Evangelical preaching can 
ill afford, among its motives to right and beau- 
tiful lives, not to insist upon this too neglected 
truth, that there are, and from the very nature 
of virtue and moral agency there must be, dif- 
ferences of degrees in the happiness or unhap- 
piness of the future life ; differences of capacity, 



r 

^" at 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 133 



among saints and sinners, for\heaven and hell. 
Scriptural hints should have kept us in mind of 
this influential truth of immediate practical con- 
cern, as it surely is, in the conduct of life. You 
remember we are told that the servant who 
knew his lord's will and prepared not himself, 
neither did according to his will, shall be beaten 
with many stripes; but he that knew not,, and 
did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be 
beaten with few stripes ; and in the parable of 
the talents we have Jesus' express declaration 
that unto every one that hath shall be given, 
but from him that hath not shall be taken away 
even that which he hath ; — it shall be given, that 
is, to every one who hath, according to his ca- 
pacity to receive; and he who hath not shall 
suffer loss according to his capacity to lose. 
You remember, also, that in the Sermon on the 
Mount the rewards which crown the different 
virtues are each admirably adapted to the spe- 
cific nature of the sevei-al virtues ; there seems 
to be a peculiar fitness and some law of propor- 
tion in the blessings promised. Thus the Bible 
does suggest quite plainly this truth, AN'liich we 
ought to take almost for granted, as a matter 



134 DISCOURSES, 

of course, without any need of revelation to 
teach it to us, that, as there are now differences 
of capacity for things good or evil developing 
themselves among men, and within the same 
church-fold, so there shall be differences of 
quality and degrees of happiness in the future 
life. In heaven every cup doubtless shall be 
full, but this life may determine great differ- 
ences between the sizes of the cups. Each soul 
shall doubtless be as happy then as it can be ; 
but what differences of capacity for love and 
heaven human hearts are developing now ! So, 
then, there is a real and delightful sense in which, 
all along through our earthly existence, we may 
lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. A man 
can take nothing with him from this world — 
the gold which he hoards up will fall into the 
grasp of other hands, — but what a man has 
gained in himself that he takes with him into 
the world to come; — the splendid treasures of 
memory, the treasures of disciplined powers, of 
enlarged capacities, of a pure and loving heart, 
all are treasures which a man may carry in 
him and with him into that world where neither 
moth nor rust doth corrupt. The eye, indeed, 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS, 135 

may lose its sight at death, and the cunning 
hand of the workman may lose its skill, but 
that enrichment of mind which may have been 
gained through the eye in patient and loving 
observation of this world, so beautiful and ex- 
pressive of God's thoughts, shall not be lost, 
and the discipline of powers which may have 
been acquired through years of faithful work- 
manship shall continue as a spiritual capacity 
in the world to come. What we lay up, too, in 
the lives of others are riches which may return 
to US ao^ain in the world to come. Souls that 
have gone before us freighted richly with our 
affections, and carrying parts of our lives with 
them to the other shore, shall await us there to 
share with us once more the treasures of friend- 
ship which in them we may already have safely 
laid up in heaven. All that we may do or gain 
in the development of our powers, in enlarging 
the soul, in enriching the heart, in increasing 
our capacity to love ; all that providence may 
gain for us through sorrow, trial, and the '' with- 
lield completions" of the present, in ([uicken- 
ing our susceptibility of mind and heart for 
heaven ; all these acquisitions shall enter into 



136 DISCOURSES. 

the happiness and rewards of the future life. 
Of such rewards we may well deem ourselves 
unworthy, and it will be of grace that we are 
saved; but these attainments of Christian en- 
deavor, these rewards of faithfulness to our 
own powers, and^ our own opportunities, are 
held out to us in the gospel of the kingdom of 
heaven as incentives to every noble ambition, 
every honorable pursuit, every true study of 
God's thoughts, and every life-long imitation of 
the Christ. 

This, then, seems to me to be the purpose of 
revelation, not to gratify curiosity, but to train 
character ; not to give the future to our knowl- 
edge, but to save our hearts for its possibili- 
ties of immortality. This mortal stage in all 
its lights and shadows seems arranged for 
scenes of probation. The intent of God in the 
Bible evidently is not so to open the secrets of 
the hereafter as to enable us to answer those 
questions, deep and dark, whose shadows fall 
upon us as we think of the past and the future ; 
but Jesus taught his disciples to impress upon 
men with all earnestness the unspeakable im- 
portance for our whole future of making a 



NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE ELEMENTS. 137 

right decision of life now ; and to open before 
our aspirations such views of the future life, of 
its enlarged opportunities, its grand possibili- 
ties, and its divine attractiveness, as shall be to 
us in our toil aud in our sorrows, in our studies 
and our business, in all our thinking, and in all 
our loving, an inspiration and a joy, a pure 
enthusiasm of spirit, and as a very baptism of 
grace from on high upon our daily life. 

Revelation, then, to put what I would say 
into one word, does give to our rational belief 
a practical heaven and a practical hell — enough 
of each is declared for all practical purposes of 
the present life. We do know and can under- 
stand enough concerning both to lead us to put 
ourselves at once into training for the life of 
glory and virtue which we may hope through 
Christ to find as the heavenly fruition of eartli's 
best life ; and to fear as the loss of the soul 
itself, and the darkness of all true life and love, 
the death of eternal sin^l 

Remember, then, let me urge as the conclusion 
of the whole matter, that av(^ do have Bible 
enough for present duty. Though the doctrines 
of our faith may be left in partial obscurity, 



138 DISCOURSES, 

and there are great spaces of shadow even in 
revelation, the duties of the right life are the 
illuminated texts of Scripture. Repent, believe, 
be converted, love, pray, have the spirit of 
Christ, — there can be little moral doubt about 
the nature of the life which the commandments 
of Christ enjoin. And though we must needs 
walk of ttimes in the mists^ we may keep with 
resolute feet the way, seeing not far on either 
hand, yet following surely the path of duty 
once trod by the Master who has gone to pre- 
pare a place for us. Are we obeying that 
Gospel which has in its voice to our hearts the 
very sweetness of God's charity blended with 
the deep undertone of his justice ? the Gospel 
in which heavenly mercy and hope are in 
harmony with infinite truth and po^ver, as the 
sono;s of bii'ds of the air make no discord over 
the deep sub-base of Niagara's ceaseless music ? 



J 



VI. 

SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from 
God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. — 
Rev. xxi. 3. 

Society, then, is immortal. It is the city of 
God which the revelator saw coming from 
heaven. The hope of social immortality forms 
the ground-tone, and runs through the whole 
woof of the Biblical doctrine of the future life. 
This idea of the immortality of society is one of 
those truths which might aptly be called the 
unconscious beliefs of the Bible. The inspired 
writers, almost without noticing it, or thinking 
about it, seem to take it for granted in all their 
discourse concerning the hereafter. We ought 
to receive with the utmost confidence those 
truths which pervade, like an atmosphei-e, the 
whole Bible. The everywhere understood, un- 
conscious faiths of the Bible are the very 



I40 DISCOURSES. 

last truths wliicli we should doubt or question, 
even tliouo;]i it mio;ht be diificult to find in the 
Scriptures a single proof-text of definite teach- 
ing concerning them. The hope of social im- 
mortality — the expectation of the city of Grod — 
belongs to this order of Biblical truths. Yet so 
far have we departed from this all-pervasive 
Scriptural thought of the city of God and the 
immortality of society, that we sometimes hear 
Christians asking whether we shall recognize 
our friends in heaven. As though an isolated 
immortality were any more a future possibility 
than a merely individual life is a present pos- 
sibility ; as though God had made each soul a 
little drop of being by itself, and not caused 
every child rather to be born into the depend- 
encies of human existence, and to come to its 
own life only through the lives of others. 
When did God ever create a single soul to 
abide in itself alone ? to dwell unrelated and 
complete in the closed circle of its own little 
individuality ? Even if we could conceive of a 
soul existing by itself as a solitary human atom ; 
if it ever were possible for a human being to 
become a man in and of himself alone, it would 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 141 

be better for that man if he had never been 
born. An isolated, friendless life of a few 
years becomes almost unendurable. Loneliness 
prolonged to eternity would be intolerable tor- 
ment. That man who can even imagine him- 
self as enjoying heaven for himself alone is not 
fit for the kingdom of heaven. The perfect in- 
dividual is not possible apart from society. 

Very different from the severe, excessive in- 
dividualism which pervades the Calvinistic 
philosophy of man, is the broad, healthy, social 
philosophy of human nature which is taken for 
granted in the Bible, and which gives form and 
shape to the revelator's vision of the coming 
from heaven of the city of God. Indeed, if we 
will but divest ourselves of merely textual and 
school-boy habits of interpreting the Scriptures, 
and seek rather to follow the movement, and to 
catch the spirit, and so to receive the real in- 
spiration of the Bible, we shall find ourselves 
with regard to the whole doctrine of the future 
life, as well as in respect to many other truths, 
believing with a much healthier, stronger, and 
exultant faith. If we take pains to foHow tlie 
growth of the hope of immortality through the 



142 DISCOURSES. 

Bible, we shall not be at a loss to see how the 
whole Biblical teaching of immortality comes to 
fruition in this final truth of the holy city, the 
new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of 
heaven. 

For the idea of the perpetuation of a chosen 
race, not the idea of continued personal exist- 
ence, forms in the Old Testament the founda- 
tion, the broad fundamental basis, for the up- 
building of the hope of immortality. The 
Hebrews looked forward to the continuance of 
the family -name in Israel, and to the final 
splendors of a Messianic kingdom. Then, upon 
that broad, social ground, the hope of personal 
immortality might spring up, and reach its 
Christian perfection. 

But we usually reverse the Biblical argument. 
We reason that the individual soul cannot 
cease to exist; and then, having satisfied our- 
selves that we personally are to keep on living 
after death, we begin to w^onder whether we 
shall live also in the renewed companionship of 
our old friends. So we make the Biblical faith 
in immortality stand upon its apex instead of 
upon its broad social base. The Bible, we 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 143 

seem to forget, rests tlie hope of the individual 
upon the good purpose of God for the race ; 
the blessed life of the saved soul here and here- 
after depends upon the gracious work of God 
for humanity — not for the elect — but for hu- 
manity, in that Christ died for all. 

When Jesus came, bringing immortality to 
light, we read that he went about all Galilee 
preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. In 
Jesus' speech we do not find the period put to 
this sentence where our popular usage usually 
stops; — we say preaching the Gospel — here it is 
said, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom. 
He preached not the Gospel merely of indi- 
vidual salvation, as though each little man were 
saved for his own little self — but the Gospel of 
a redeemed society, a new, purified, glorified 
society, the Gospel — there is no better phrase 
for it than Jesus' own word — the Gospel of the 
kingdom. To preach Christ's Gospel, therefore, 
is not merely to preach to you in order that you 
may be saved at last, but that you may be saved 
as members of the new heavenly society ; not 
for your own selves only, but saved in and for 
the communion of the saints, and for the delight- 



144 DISCOURSES. 

ful friendships and reciprocities of the society of 
Christ on earth and in heaven. And as Jesus 
preached, so he worked; and the Father was 
with him in that divinest of works, the creation 
of a new society out of the chaos of sin. This 
is Christianity — not a new doctrine, not another 
law, not a better code of ethics — but a new 
society of forgiven souls, founded in the love of 
God, and made one in the communion of the 
Holy Ghost. 

You can hardly fail to notice how widely our 
common speech concerning salvation has de- 
parted from this broader and deeper Biblical 
teaching. I wish now to present the argument 
for immortality in the light of this • purer and 
most Christian conception of the holy city of 
God. 

We may infer that human society is immortal 
both from what it is and from what it is not. 
So far as it is now finished, and so far, also, as 
it is at present incomplete, human society 
prophesies the coming from heaven of the holy 
city of God. 

First, then, I argue social immortality from 
what society already has become so far as 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY, 145 

the Creator has finished it and pronounced it 
good. 

Let me at the outset put the reasoning before 
you in its bare intellectuality, and then we may 
feel the moral force of it through some concrete 
illustrations of it. Human society, then, I 
would say, so far at least as it is finished, is a 
creation possessing absolute moral worth, and 
therefore it must belong to the eternities. 
Society is not an accidental condition, a mere 
circumstance of human life, but a moral good 
in and of itself, absolutely indispensable to 
finite beings for their full, personal growth 
and perfection. The wilderness is, indeed, a 
necessary part of every true, great life, but in 
the wilderness alone no man ever reached his 
full stature. The least in the kingdom of 
heaven is greater than John the Baptist. As 
possessing absolute moral worth, then, and as 
essential to the full fruition of individual life, 
society is, and from its very nature must be, of 
the eternal. It cannot pass away. 

Such is the argument for social immortality 
presented in the dry logic of the intellect. But, 
in order to realize and to keep fresh our great 



146 DISCOURSES. 

natural faiths, in order to find the deep sources 
of permanent joy, we mast be guided by some- 
thino; better and diviner than the mere loofic of 
the understanding. AYe must search the deep 
things of God with what Wordsworth calls the 
'^ feeling intellect," the '* vital souL" And surely 
the vital soul entering: into and makino- its own 
the relations of human society, and the intima- 
cies of pure friendship, needs no voice from 
heaven to come and sinoj in its heart of their 
immortality. Thus it is noteworthy how in 
Carlyle's recollections of his father, and his 
richly pathetic tribute to his wife, this native 
and inexhaustible belief of the ^'feelinor intel- 
lect " in the immortality of our lives in others, 
and theirs in om^s, wells up at times to the sur- 
face out of the deeps of Carlyle's rugged nature. 
A lesson, not without its special significance for 
our age, lies before us in the contrast between 
the labored and conscious unbelief of the great 
mind of John Stuart Mill, who had never 
known a true human childhood, who never 
speaks of the touch of a mother's love upon all 
the springs of his being, and whose one strong 
affection ripened late upon the trunk of a life 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY, 147 

sturdy and straight, but all too leafless and 
songless; and, on the other hand, the primal 
faith, greater and more vital than conscious 
thought or confession, of this rugged, rustic 
nature, which was full of thorns and repug- 
nances, indeed, against the careless, passing 
world, but which, as these " Reminiscences " 
show, blossomed into at least one deeply human, 
unspeakably tender, life-long love. Life-long? 
Age-long rather, in itself heir of immortalit}' ! 
At the close of one of these reverent memories 
of his ''bright one," he exclaims, as though 
compelled by the very truth of the love in him 
to think of immortality in the same thought 
with her, '' What bounty too is in heaven ! " 
Memory becomes itself an upward glance — the 
past of love is the best prophet of its future. 
"What bounty too is in heaven!" So love, 
like a sunbeam, proceeding forth from the 
primal source of life, can be bound by no little 
*earthly Jiorizons, but, touching this world with 
its brief moment of brightness, glances awaj^, to 
shine on and on in God's heavens forever. 

The absolute moral Avortli of the society into 
which we are born, and hence, in some form of 



148 DISCOURSES, 

it, the eternal conservation of its good, may be 
known by any man or woman wlio will enter in 
a large-hearted way into any of its obligations 
and reciprocities. If we would believe in im- 
mortality we must live as immortals. If men 
are content to live as tlie brutes that perish, 
they can hardly be expected to rise to a human 
faith in immortality. A pure heart, expanding 
in the possible affections of humanity, is its 
own best reason for faith in immortality. 

There is one human relation, in particular, 
which, as it may become an almost ideally per- 
fect type of friendship, contains, to my think- 
ing, an inexpressibly rich presage of social im- 
mortality — I mean the relation of brother and 
sister — a relation too often, I know, made 
prasaic and commonplace, but in God's thought 
of it, I must believe, and in some human realiza- 
tions of it, ideally beautiful. When Charles 
Lamb might have been seen walking with the 
sister for whom he had willingly sacrificed the 
happiness of other love, upon one of those sad 
days when the approaching shadow of her 
strange visitation warned them that they must 
seek the only refuge earth could give until the 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 



149 



storm should be overpast — an insane asylum — 
leading her with the straight- jacket under his 
arm through the streets of London to the only 
safe retreat, and waiting in his own deserted 
chambers till the visitation were over, to lead 
her home again; was there not in that rare 
affection conquering death in life something im- 
mortal? something by its present existence 
proving its right to be forever ? something 
which God could not have made for naught, 
but which, as He looked down from his throne 
among the stars upon those two friends in their 
sad walk through the streets of London, in 
their lifelong faithfulness of joy and sorrow, 
must have seemed to his pure eye of pity to be 
of great price ? Brother and sister — he who 
may once have been so blessed of heaven as to 
have learned the real meaning of those Avords ; 
he to whom in the mystery of this life, bounded 
its whole radiant circumference around by 
death's darkness and the great unknown, these 
words, brother, sister, may have become full of 
pure depths of remembered meanings ; he has 
had opened in the knowledge of his own heart 
one of God's own, best reasons for immortality. 



150 DISCOURSES, 

Never can those sacred words, brother, sister, 
fall lightly from his lips ; and in his inmost 
sonl he will shrink from the debasement of 
those rich words in the counterfeit sentimental- 
ity of pious speech. Words to him genuine as 
gold, and stamped with the mintage of life's 
truest worth, he can ill endure to see debased, 
chipped, and soiled, in the small change of 
religious and professional intercourse; he will 
not accustom himself to the counterfeit use of 
that word, brother, in ordinary clerical inter- 
course and mere business correspondence ; and 
he will wish always to retain a reverence for 
unselfish and radiant womanhood too sincere 
and holy to suffer his lips to be betrayed into 
the unmeaning, vulgar, cant use of that pure 
word — to me a bright memory of youth become 
a brighter hope of heaven ! — sister ! 

But, not to wander from my theme, this rela- 
tion of brother and sister, I would say, often so 
singularly complete and beautiful, and in its 
very completeness and beauty ideal type almost 
of a perfected society, is itself, in its own worth, 
a reason for its continuance after death. Its 
very existence contains an implied promise of 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY, 151 

immortality. It does not look ^^ though it 
^Yere made but for a moment. It must be one 
of the eternal counsels of Grod. For, if we be- 
believe that there is a Creator, then, I argue 
most confidently, a God could not have been 
great and good enough to think of a relationship 
so rich and beneficent, and then have called it 
forth to shine as a mere earthly iridescence, and 
after a moment of divine delight in it have let 
it go out in eternal darkness. I cannot believe 
that God has created such clear, steady, shining 
affections in man and woman as mere will-o'- 
the-wisps to mislead us ; they are implications 
of immortality — they contain in themselves the 
Creator's intimation of their immortality. There 
is hardly a reason for the persistence after death 
of the individual mind, which is not enhanced 
and multiplied many-fold when we consider 
man as God has created him in the family ; 
when we reflect that all of the moral motives 
which we may reverently imagine could liave 
been in the thought of the Creator when he 
called human society into existence, are reasons 
which still more, and with mightier cogency of 
love, might lead Him to make that society to 



152 DISCOURSES, 

exist foreverjran indestructible and immortal 
good. 

But tliere is another aspect of this argument 
for social immortality to be taken into our 
view. That which is still unfinished in human 
society is a reason for our trust in God's pur- 
pose to complete in his own time a redeemed 
and perfected society. It looks, that is to say, 
as though the Creator had begun a good work 
in the formation and development of human 
society, which he has not yet carried to com- 
pletion, and the very fact that he has begun it, 
and done already so much divine work upon it, 
is a strong presumption for the belief that he 
will never leave it until he shall have finished 
it. It would not be like God to leave his work 
half done. God's purpose cannot prove to be 
but a broken column. Every shaft must find 
at last its capital in the divine order of the 
architecture of the universe. Therefore, society, 
already so firmly founded and so well begun in 
these human relationships and affections, shall 
be completed in glory. This, expressed in a 
few words, is the great argument for social im- 
mortality which will grow upon us as we learn 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY, 153 

from experience the present incompleteness of 
God's own best work in human society. 

To give this reasoning force and point, I need 
only remind you of the many unmistakable 
signs that human society is as yet only begun, 
and is very far from being finished. The best 
system of society possible in this world-age is 
only rudimentary. The outward, physical con- 
ditions of this world are fitted only for an 
embryonic stage of society, not for a full-winged 
and full-grown society. In its idea and ap- 
parent intention human society is something 
evidently above this earth, and for a larger than 
this temporal life, but it is still bound within 
earthly conditions. Its highest spiritual re- 
lationships are rooted and grounded in laws of 
physical descent. The best society is some- 
thing celestial confined still within a shell of 
earthliness. It is useless, it is wicked to wish 
even to break prematurely, before death, the 
shell of earthly conditions and limitations 
within which society must be carefully matured 
for the free, sinless life of heaven. Human 
lusts breaking: throui>:h the laws of the social 
order would quickly turn this world into a hell. 



154 DISCOURSES. 

Human love, gromng strong and pure in obedi- 
ence to the laws of the social order, makes of 
happy homes beginnings of heaven. Genius 
has sometimes felt itself free to soar above 
common social restrictions into an empyrean of 
its own ; but it only repeats by its folly the 
old fable and melts its own wings. When did 
genius ever become stronger, brighter, more 
inspired, by disregard of common morality? 
Byron singed his genius in his own passion. 
Shelley's wild fancy might have become a 
steadier, higher flame, had it been fed, in one 
lifelong marriage, upon the pure oil of domestic 
truth and happiness. Goethe's poetic art was 
not made more deeply human and more heavenly 
pure by his selfish loves for women, and his 
imagination needed for its glorification a touch 
of the sacred enthusiasm of the poet who 
lived ^^ As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." 
Possibly George Eliot might have come nearer 
finding the missing truth in her life's thought 
of self-renunciation, had her genius not been 
drawn still farther into the cold shadows of the 
eclipse of faith in George Lewes' home. 

There are, then, conditions and necessities of 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 155 

human society which may at times prove 
burdensome to the individual who sujJers from 
circumstances, or his own fateful mistakes ; but 
which, nevertheless, are essential to the very 
existence of a growing organism of society such 
as that of this earth is, and which we must 
quietly accept, therefore, as for this world, at 
least, the wisely ordained laws of social life. 
Socialism in its various forms is a vain rebellion 
against them. But if we do feel at times their 
pressure upon our individuality, or if in others 
they seem sometimes to be hard necessities of 
toil, or sacrifice, or loneliness, we should re- 
member that society is in the narrowness of the 
bud now, not in the openness of the flower, and 
some leaves may be cramped for a season before 
it be full-blown. There is much in the present 
system of corporate existence which is neces- 
sarily limited and temporary — much scaffolding 
of the rougher elements of this world which 
shall come down when the temple of God, held 
in its perfectness in his eye from the beginning, 
shall at last be finished. As the human body, 
in which whole ages of ascending types come 
forth at last completed, is, nevertheless, but the 



156 DISCOURSES, 

temporary physical basis for the life of an im- 
mortal soul, and, while serviceable for the first 
few score years of our existence, would not do 
at all for the activities and possibilities of a 
full-grown and perfected soul ; so this present 
form of human society is the fruition of the 
social instincts that have striven up to man, and 
answers wisely and well its purpose for a sea- 
son; but it would hardly be good enough to 
last forever, and it shall at length give place to 
the higher and perfected organization of society, 
the new Jerusalem, the holy city coming down 
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride 
adorned for her husband. How many present 
imperfections, how much incompleteness re- 
mains to be done away ! Enforced separations 
of friends; great spaces of absence; strange 
interruptions of happy companionships — to say 
nothing of lesser breaks and flaws in the social 
happiness of even the best men and women ; 
imperfect sympathies ; cares treading affections 
down in hard, worn lives ; circumstances closing 
opportunities ; sicknesses shutting the outflow of 
activities ; necessities and responsibilities with- 
out number repressing oft with heavy weight 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY, 157 

the play of spirit ; these, and other such limita- 
tions and incongruities of the present system of 
society as we see it now begun among us, and 
ourselves are parts of its imperfection, belong 
all of them, as we may devoutly hope, to its 
present world-and-time conditions only, not to 
its eternal fruition. These earthly and tem- 
poral limitations shall fall away, as the sheath 
is stripped from the ripened grain, when the 
harvest shall come which is the end of the 
world. The whole creation now travails in 
pain together for the liberty of the sons of God. 
Then, when the end shall come, when the city of 
God shall be the final and perfected form of 
society, these former things shall have passed 
away. The physical, earthly laws of birth and 
death shall have accomplished their work, and 
be needed no more for the fulness and manif old- 
ness of life in the kingdom of heaven. The 
long succession of the generations shall cease, 
and society become an ever-present companion- 
ship of the redeemed. The days of upbuilding 
which God has carried on through the ages in 
which, as Jesus said, My Fatlier wcn'keth hither- 
to and I work, shall be ended, and the day of 



158 DISCOURSES, 

joyous rest shall begin. The Sabbath of society 
shall come at last. So Jesus thought of the 
perfect society, complete in the glory of the 
angels, when he answered the Sadducee's puz- 
zling question concerning that poor, overmuch 
married woman. They could form only a low, 
worldly conception of what society may grow 
to be. They could only project the temporary 
conditions of life in this world into the next, as 
they thought of the hereafter. So they were 
perplexed to imagine how human society could 
pass on into immortality, and they thought by 
their shrewd difficulty to puzzle the very Christ ! 
But with a divine insi^^ht into the abidinof reali- 
ties beneath passing forms of things, Jesus 
brushed away their vain imaginations with a 
single word of truth : '^ For in the resurrection, 
they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, 
but are as the anQ:els of God in heaven." These 
familiar forms of social life are temporal ; but 
the substance — the reality which we carry 
hence with us in our hearts — is eternal. The 
outward shall pass away, but the inward truth 
of love shall abide forever. For in the resur- 
rection — when this world-age, that is, shall be 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. 159 

over, and the fruition of all its struo:o;le of life 
upwards shall appear — they shall neither marry, 
nor be given in marriage. Whatever in human 
relationships and affections was only of the 
'earth earthy shall pass away, but love shall 
abide — love pure and true, radiant and change- 
less ; for they shall be as the angels of God in 
heaven. 

My thought has skirted but the shores and 
shallows of a boundless hope. The horizon of 
it lies ever beyond us, and as in the light of set- 
ting suns. But enough may have been suggest- 
ed to awaken in some hearts afresh the joy of this 
great hope. This whole argument for a com- 
plete and blessed social immortality rests in the 
last analysis upon this simplest yet profound- 
est of truths that God has made everything in 
this world and its history to grow until his own 
harvest time ; a truth this to be found alike, in 
some form of it, in all scientific study of the 
nature of things, and hidden, also, in the very 
heart of Scripture. Human society is only in 
tlie germ now ; hereafter shall God gather the 
ripe fruit of this tree of life for his heaven. 

Go then to your firesides, and, as you take 



l6o DISCOURSES. 

your children in your arms, in the delight of 
their fresh lives rejoice in the hope of the im- 
mortality of the household love and joy ; for of 
such is the kingdom of heaven. , Take this 
blessed hope with you into the desolate home — 
the rooms, so empty now, where everything sug- 
gests a presence that never comes again — keep 
this hope singing in your heart of hearts as you 
still dwell for a little while amid the many fad- 
ing things with which but yesterday a vanished 
love was clothed; there too in the deserted 
home, faith may hear the angel say, ^^ He is not 
here, for he is risen ! " Cherish this blessed truth 
which pervades with its sweet comfort all God's 
word of promise, and is near to nature's heart, 
that society is immortal, and the holy city 
shall come down from God out of heaven. Ye 
are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of 
the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and 
to an innumerable company of angels. 

That bright, restful world-future we do not 
and need not envy, for our work may hasten the 
coming of that day, and by the grace of God we 
are the heirs of it ; and the redeemed of the Lord 
from all the ages past wait for us, as we shall 



SOCIAL IMMORTALITY. i6l 

wait also for others after us, until that day; 
^' that they " — as an Apostle said with a deep, 
touching sense of the mutual dependence of 
God's people in all the generations, and their 
final completeness in the society of the finished 
and perfect kingdom of God, — " that they with- 
out us should not be made perfect" 






Mil 



APPENDIX. 



DiscouESE I. — Note 1, p. 26. 

This hopeful opinion with regard to present theo- 
logical toleration was expressed before the recent "un- 
usual proceeding in the Free Church of Scotland had 
deprived Prof. Robertson Smith of his professorship. 
It should be remembered that the Free Chm^ch by this 
exceptional action has rendered no direct decision 
against his teaching, or the right of a clergyman within 
its pale to pursue critical studies of the literary history 
of the Bible. It cannot be too strongly urged that a 
real faith in God's Word can be afraid of no science. 
On the contrary, the prevalence of luihistorical as well 
as of extreme rationalistic views of the Bible, and the 
increasing circulation among the people of the assump- 
tions of destructive critics who proceed from a denial 
of the supernatural (as in the " Bible for Learners '') lay 
a duty upon evangelical churches of encouraging among 



1 64 APPENDIX. 

their ministry the science of historical and Biblical 
criticism. Scholars of evangelical faith should be 
beforehand in sifting out the truth from these new 
studies, and in bringing the wheat from these fresh 
fields of investigation to the people. Protestant faith, 
surely, cannot be saved by any protective policy of 
ignorance ; and any appeal in these high matters to 
popular prejudice or ecclesiastical fears is unworthy 
the Protestant Church. Should a conflict similar to 
that now going on in the Free Church of Scotland 
ever arise in our own land, it is devoutly to be hoped 
that impossible, because utterly unhistorical, theories 
of inspiration may not betray any church into the 
suicidal policy of laying hands of ecclesiastical violence 
upon the sincere and candid Biblical scholarship which 
in its own better way finds the authority and power of 
God in the Scriptures. The beginnings of intolerance 
toward more scientific views of revelation and inspira- 
tion should be discouraged everywhere by all good men 
who believe that the "Word of God is able to stand in 
its own commanding truth, and that it does not need 
to be propped up by any mechanical devices of human 
invention. Free and thoughtful discussions, not eccle- 
siastical bulls, are what the interests of faith and the 
truth of God's Word demand of theological leaders at 
the present time. 



APPENDIX, 165 

DiscouKSE II. — Note 2, p. 50. 

I do not forget that not a few sentiments of human- 
ity and fraternity may be gathered from classic writers, 
particularly from the later Stoics, such as Mr. Lecky 
in his " History of European Morals " has taken pains 
to collect ; the darker side, however, of the history of 
the decaying empires of the Old "World makes itself 
painfully felt. Heander in one of his minor, and I be- 
lieve untranslated writings (" Wissenschaf tliche Abhand- 
lungen," s. 140 f .), with his usual profound historical 
analysis, has probed to the quick the moral incom- 
petency of the ancient social philosophy. The pre- 
Christian ethics were powerless to create, and even to 
conceive of, the one true society, the real brotherhood 
of man. In this essay on the " Relation of Hellenic to 
Christian Ethics," Xeander quotes the remarkable saying 
of Zeno, that there shall be one life and one world, as 
one flock led by a common law ; but he shows that 
antiquity possessed no power to realize this conception, 
and that the idea itself, moreover, was defective and 
unrealizable. It resembles an unclear, communistic 
idea of society, a tendency to reduce humanity to an 
inorganic mass, ending in the dissolution rather tli an 
the fulfilling of the natural differences and original 
orderings of society (Ibid., p. 152). Keander concludes 
this comprehensive survey of the ethical course of 
antiquity with these weighty words upon Keoplaton- 



1 66 APPEXDIX, 

ism : " So Tve see the development of ancient ethics, in 
opposition to the principle of a divine humanity to be 
realized in all, which lias been brought by Christ into 
the world, close with that egotistic, aristocratic, parti- 
cularism." (Ibid., p. 211). 

For a full substantiation of the statement made 
above, I need only refer, among recent books, to Uhl- 
horn's " Conflict of Christianity and Heathenism." 

DisconiSE n. — ^XoTE 3, p. 56. 

From an exalted ethical conception of the Divine 
Reality, large and illumined views open out in every 
direction through our theology. To gain it is therefore 
the first duty of the Biblical theologian ; and if theology 
is surveyed from any lower point of view, all the doc- 
tiines will be thrown out of then- true relations and 
right adjustment. Fi*equent points of confusion and 
contradiction in our doctrinal lines indicate that we 
have started them from some too low, partial, or un- 
moral idea of God. Could we gain a perfect moral 
apprehension of God, such as the sinless Christ pos- 
sessed, all doubt and pei-plexity would disappear from 
our thought of His ways and works. 

The ethical, rather than the metaphysical, being of 
God, it should ever be remembered, is the subject of 
revelation, as the Bible is the book of religion rather 
than a system of philosophy, A real knowledge of the 



APPENDIX, 167 

true God can be gained only through a true life, as 
Jesns (Jn. xvii. 3.) identifies knowledge of the only 
true God and eternal life. So, also, 1st Jn. t. 20. 

The philosophical advantages of an ethical method 
of apprehending the idea of God are such as these; 
viz., 1. It lifts thought out of merely metaphysical 
difficulties and subtleties. God as love is a positively 
known God, however finite and inadequate may be our 
thouo'ht of him. Chiistian theoloo^v does not have 
to do with a blank Absolute, or negative Infinite, or 
metaphysical Indifference, but with the li^'ing God, the 
Father of spuits, who has revealed himself in his es- 
sential reality as love. 2. It overcomes deism while it 
saves the truth at the heart of pantheism. The ethical 
conception of God is the reconciliation both of the im- 
manence and the transcendence of God. God as the 
supreme Moral Power must be both above and in his 
creation. His relation to the created universe is 
primarily ethical ; and the physical and metaphysical 
nature of things, and their relation to the divine Will, 
are to be studied and interpreted in Christian theology 
under this higher and primary ethical relation of the 
Creator to his works. Love is at the heart of things, 
as it is the essential nature of God. 3. From this 
ethical method we gain a consistent conception of God's 
unchangeableness in relation to a changing world. 
Immutability is a moral predicate of God. He is a con- 
stant providence, a continuous though tfulness, over us 



1 68 APPENDIX. 

and throno-h history. Historical sameness in tlie divine 
conduct of the world might be moral mutability. On 
this subject especially see Dorner, " Christliche Glau- 
benslehre." 4. This ethical conception of the nature of 
God is indispensable to any Biblical view of the person 
and work of Christ (as shown in the third discourse). 5. 
In the light of the moral revelation of the divine glory 
we can read most intelligibly the Scriptural intimations 
of the triune nature of the Godhead. The words used 
in the Bible, the Father, the Son, imply real distiac- 
tions, an ontological Trinity ; but the revelation of the 
unity of the Father and the Son, which is vouchsafed 
in the Bible, presents it predominantly in an ethical 
light for our present thought of it. God as love is 
blessed forever in the communion of his own triune 
Being. God is not revealed to us as a blank unit, but 
as a living unity, possessing divine society in himself, 
and morally and spiritually complete in his own mani- 
foldness of being. The creation, thus, is in no sense 
necessary to the perf ectness of the triune God over all 
blessed forever. Thus, as a relation in love, Jesus, 
"- the Son of his love," speaks of his own oneness with 
the Father. Jn. xvii. 21, 24. The doctrine of the 
Trinity is more accessible to our approach fi'om this 
moral apprehension of it than it is fi^om the meta- 
physical side. We are obliged, however, to distinguish 
in tliought what may be one and inseparable in God 
and the natin-e of things ; viz., the moral and the real, 



APPENDIX. 169 

the reasonable and the actual, the ethical and the onto- 
logicaL It is one of the profoundest ideas of modem 
German thought that '' the ethical has in it, also, some- 
thing ontological. 

DiscotJESE in. — Note 4, p. 79. 

The following note is designed to indicate more 
fully the relations of the view of the atonement given 
above to other theories of it, and also to suggest certain 
directions in which it may be profitably thought out. 

The form of our conception of Christ's work depends 
ultimately upon our idea of God. If the divine Will 
be made the one-sided centre of theology, as is fre- 
quently the case in Calvinistic discussions, then the 
whole conception of the atonement will be thrown out 
of moral adjustment, and at more than one point it will 
cause friction with the moral sentiments. The centi-e 
and radiating point of our reasonings concerning re- 
demption should be a thoroughly spiritual and ethical 
belief in God as love in its comprehensive integrity. 
Starting from this idea of God, and recognizing (tocI's 
eternal will of reconciliation as grounded in his otliieal 
perfectness as love, we have then to view the incarna- 
tion and atoning work of Christ as the necessary out- 
going and satisfaction of God's own moral being in 
forgiving sinners ; and then to contemplate the fact of 
lledemption in its various historical relations to law, 



i;o APPENDIX, 

sacrifice, moral government, and the power of sin. 
We need not reject utterly other partial views, and 
lower analogies which may serve to illustrate different 
aspects of redemption ; but from our higher ethical 
conception we should work down among these imperfect 
views, and along these lower lines, correcting what is not 
pm-ely spuitualin them, and bringing their partial truths 
into harmony with the central idea of love. The rela- 
tions of law, government, honor, covenant, public justice, 
etc., express real relations of the highest personal Love 
to the universe ; and theories of atonement based upon 
them (as the chivalric, or Anselm's, the governmental, 
the juridical, the federal, etc.) correspond, each and 
all, to something true in God or man ; but tliey rest 
upon partial and secondary truths, and should be rec- 
ognized and used as derivative and secondary concep- 
tions of the original and comprehensive truth that God 
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. 
The personal (ethical) relation of God to man is before 
the governmental ; it is first in the order of time and of 
thought ; and, above all dispensations of covenant and 
law, it remains the primary and supreme relation of 
man to the Father of spmts. Before the law was 
given, Adam was born a living soul, and man is first 
and in his essential moral being a son of God. The 
vicarious work of the second Adam satisfies and can 
harmonize all other necessities, all historic relations of 
God to the world, because it is the completion and per- 



APPENDIX. 



171 



feet moral satisfaction of this first, personal relation of 
the Father to the son that was lost and is found. 

The necessity of the atonement, according to this view 
of it, lies in the moral fact that God is not, and as per- 
fect Love cannot be, eternally reconciled to sin in him- 
self, in the quiet depths of his own pure being, without 
some activity of righteous Love in view of sin ; — re- 
conciliation is not a mere state, if one may so speak, of 
the divine consciousness, but it is the act of an out-^ 
going God toward the sinner. It will be seen, there- 
fore, that our idea of the atonement, though starting 
from a supreme moral thought of God, is not a merely 
subjective view of it. Sin has become objective in a 
history of wrong-doing — objective, too, both as the fact 
of guilt, and as the power of evil in the world. But, 
beginning as we do with the purely moral, primary per- 
sonal relation of God to man, we can then hope to 
eurvey in their true light, from this centre and height, 
the various historical relations and transactions of God 
toward man, and of man toward God, such as law, 
revelation, promise, disobedience, sin, penitence, rejec- 
tion of the Holy Spirit. 

The view of the Atonement which I have suggested, 
may readily be worked out critically in reference to 
prevalent theories of it. Thus, the older juridical and 
penal theories begin with a genuine idea of righteous- 
ness, and the demands of strict justice, but they fail to 
recognize with clear ethical insight the essential oneness 



1/2 



APPENDIX, 



of all moral predicates in the divine nature, and hence 
their necessary unity in all revelation or activity of 
God in history ; and they proceed, accordingly, to con- 
ceive of the nature of Christ's work too much under 
the domination of some one divine attribute, or in view 
of the demands of some special moral relation of God 
to the universe, making the requirements of justice, or 
law, or the divine veracity, or the terms of a supposed 
covenant, their rule and measuring-rod for the work of 
perfect Love in forgiving sin ; and hence these theories 
run into legalism, or artificial imputation, or even into 
a quantitative substitution of Christ's suffering for the 
penalty of sin ; and they fail in proportion to be under- 
stood by the simple Christian conscience, or to carry 
the full consent of Christian hearts. 

On the other hand, the Is^ew England, or govern- 
mental theory of the Atonement, reacting from these 
artificialities of the older theology, begins with certain 
well defined moral axioms rather than from a deep 
ethical consciousness of grace ; and it proceeds by a 
dialectic method rather than through spiritual insight, 
to analyze the nature of the Godhead mto different 
species of benevolence and justice, and to construct a 
series of moral plausibilities concernmg the divine 
government of the world, and the purposes secured 
under it by the sufferings of Christ, which are logically 
connected and satisfactory to any one who does not 
venture to question its definitions, or whose spiritual 



APPENDIX. 173 

thirst for reality in theology does not lead him beyond 
its phraseology to search for the fountains of moral 
truth and spiritual life. As the governmental theory 
does not begin far enough back, so it does not end in 
the comprehension and fullness of all other theories of 
Atonement, as we may be sure the true and final 
philosophy of it will do ; but we find that it divides 
farther down into two different modes of thought, one 
the moral influence theory, the other a tendency to re- 
turn toward older theories in the feeling that some 
deeper, spiritual truth of Christ has been lost. The 
governmental theory, unless we take its truth up into 
some larger spiritual thought of God, is in danger of 
leaving for us a reconciliation of policy, rather than 
from the heart of God. 

A few words may need to be added to prevent mis- 
understanding of the view of the necessity of suffering 
in forgiveness which has been outlined merely in the 
sermon upon this subject. 1. With regard to the 
person of Christ, and his qualification for the work of 
reconciliation, it should be noticed that both natures, 
and their union in Ilim, are as necessary upon this 
view as in any other theory of his atoning sufferings. 
Both the vicarious principle of love in God, and the 
capacity in human nature for vicarious representa- 
tion, are met in the person of Christ ; so that in liis 
sufferings for sin there may V)o the perfect recognition 
on the pe.rt of humanity of the rigliteonsncss of love 



174 APPENDIX, 

which cannot forgive without at the same time con- 
demning sin in sorrow for it, as well as the perfect out- 
going and manifestation on the part of God of his 
whole feeling toward sin in Christ upon the cross. 

The person of Christ is seen to be necessary in still 
another light, when we ask the question, why could not 
God's eternal will of forgiveness through suffering have 
been carried out without the incarnation and death of 
Christ ? Why could not the Father, taking the sin of 
the world to his own heart, out of his own pure divine- 
ness have forgiven it ? "We have seen that the 
righteousness of love is a moral necessity of suffering 
for sin in forgiving it. But the perfectness of God's 
being precludes the thought of God's suffering in Him- 
self ; He cannot be conceived as suffering in his own 
pure divineriess, but only in some outgoing fi^om him- 
self, in some vicarious entering into the life of the 
world, and its sin and shame. The Incarnation, which 
independently of sin we hold to be the consummation of 
creative love, becomes in view of sin the possible mode 
of God's participation in the shame and the pain of our 
human history. God in Himself is God over all 
blessed forever ; God going out of Hunself in the form 
of man becomes the suffering Godman. There is an 
intimation of this twofold truth, of this divine unity 
of blessedness and sorrow, even in vicarious human 
suffering ; for there is with those Christlike ones who 
suffer for the sins of othe'rs a double consciousness — a 



APPENDIX. 175 

heart at peace in God, secure and restful in its o^Yn 
gracious goodness, beneath the sympathy and behind 
the suffering of the heart going forth in compassion and 
tears for others. Indeed, this deeper consciousness of 
good, this reserved power of blessedness, is necessary 
to genuine vicarious suffering for others ; our sympathy 
never would be unselfish and life-giving to others, 
were there not this higher consciousness of love, restful 
in its own felicity, behind it. So the blessedness of 
the eternal Father is the peace and security of Heaven 
above the darkness and the passion of the Cross ! 

The sufferings of Christ, I hold, therefore, are not 
merely modes of manifestation of God's feeling toward 
sin — an exhibition on earth of " a superhistorical pro- 
cess in God himself." For " the reality of reconcilia- 
tion" they are necessary. The incarnation is the 
necessary and real form of divine suffering for sin. 
In union with man, in the one Person of the Godman, 
the efficacious suffering of Love for sin is both possible 
and actual. Christ's passion is thus more than a mani- 
festation, it is a realization of the love of God in im- 
mediate, organic relation to man's life of sin in tlie 
world. Our statements will thus be seen to avoid 
entirely the old error of patripassianism. 

In this view of the atonement the extent of it is 
determined, not by any arbitrary election, or secret 
will of God, but by God's eternal will of redemption, 
which is grounded in his essential nature of Love, and 



176 APPENDIX. 

realized in Christ's assumption of the very nature of 
man. Its extent can be limited, then, only by the 
breadth and height of God's love on the one hand, and 
the last and lowest limit, on the other hand, of the 
natm-e which the Son of man assumed. Any othei 
limitation would make Christ cease to be the repre- 
sentative and head of our race, and would contradict 
our idea of God. 

One more remark is in point. A distinguishing 
merit of this endeavor to conceive of the work of 
Christ in its primary and supreme relation to Love, 
seems to me to be the circumstance that it enhances 
our sense of the higher naturalness of Christ's life and 
sufferings. They were not imposed, that is, by mere 
Will, by an arbitrary decree ; they were not invented 
by divine Wisdom as an after-thought of mercy for the 
propitiation of justice. They grew spontaneously, as it 
were, out of the very nature of God, and came to 
Christ in the natural working out of his mission from 
the Father. This higher moral natm^alness both of the 
unique Person and the unique work of the Christ, is 
one of the most fruitful and grandest conceptions of 
modern theology. 

DiscoiJKSE m. — Note 5, p. 80. 

It did not come within the original plan of these 
discourses to follow out this view of the Gospel of for- 



APPENDIX. 177 

giveness in its relation to morality and influence upon 
character. Justification, or love's free welcome of the 
sinner through Christ, is the first condition of a new, 
quickened moral life. Orthodox theology has much 
that is fresh and inspiriting to say of the creative 
power of manhood which proceeds from the Christ. 
The source and life of morality is contained in the 
truth which St. John felt, — We love him because he 
first loved us. God is before us in our own virtue, and 
in the growth of character, as He is before us in our 
thought of him, and in all our life. True morality is 
applied religion, and there can be no human goodness 
without something from God in it. Evangelical faitli 
secures, thus, and vitalizes every moral instinct. But 
the consideration of this fruitful subject would itself 
require a volume. 

Discourse IV. — Note 6, p. 91. 

Among those who advocate the possibility of con- 
version after death and before the last judgment, 
Rothe is careful to insist that "even at best the result 
of conversion in the kingdom of the dead .... would 
remain far behind the perfected condition of those who 
during this life in the senses, and not first, indeed, 
upon the death-bed, have turned tliemselves to the 
Redeemer." (" Theo. Ethik," § TOG). This conclusion 
Rothe reaches from his view of the relation of the 
8* 



178 APPENDIX. 

spirit, as a transforming and appropriating power, to- 
ward outward nature; lie holds that, relatively, the 
earlier the conversion, the richer the fullness of spiritual 
life that mav ensue. 



DiscouBSE V. — Note 7, p. 123. 

The AYestminster Confession says : " The souls of the 
righteous, being then (immediately after death) made 
perfect in holiness, are received into the highest 
heavens, .... and the souls of the wicked are cast 
into Hell .... Besides these two places for souls 
separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowl- 
edgeth none." (Chap, xxiii.) But, as the same Con- 
fession places above itself the Word of God, it may be 
deemed permissible to quote against this positive 
declaration the following Scriptures : Job xxxviii. 17. 
Gen. xxxvii. 35, xlii. 38, xliv. 29, 31. Ps. xvi. 9, 10, 
xviii. 5, xlix. 15, Ixxxviii. 12, Ixxxix. 48, Ixiii. 9. Ez. 
xxxii. 17-32, (See Oehler, '' Theo. d. A. T.," 1, § 259. 
Also art. " Hades " in " Herzog's Encyclop.") Beside 
these texts fi'om the Old Testament should be placed 
the passages from the Xew Testament given in the fol- 
lowing note. It should be remembered that according 
to the ]^ew Testament the souls of Dives, Lazarus, and 
Jesus, after death are represented as going to Hades. 



APPENDIX. 179 

DiscouBSE y. — Note 8, p. 128. 

The Biblical elements of this doctrine may be briefly 
summarized as follows : 

I. Those words of Jesus which refer to a time or 
state of existence between death and the last judg- 
ment; viz., the promise to the thief upon the cross, 
Luke xxiii. 43 ; and the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, Luke xvi. 19-31. Jesus used a word which 
the thief, with his Jewish ideas, could understand, 
Paradise. The promise implied that the crucified 
Messiah would be at once after death present, rec- 
ognized, and influential among the departed. It is 
thus an anticipation of the Apostolic teaching of the 
descent into Hades, 1st Peter iii. 18-19. The second 
passage cited (the parable of Lazarus) contains the fol- 
lowing truths : 1. A retributive state begins after death. 
Each character of the parable begins in Hades to re- 
ceive according to his moral capacity and deserts. 2. 
The dead are not yet flnally separated and judged. 
They exist each in his own place and manner in the 
same world of tlie dead. There is conversation between 
Abraham and the rich man. 3. The good can do 
nothing to change the condition of the bad. The bad 
can do nothing to hurt the good. Beside all this (or, 
" In all these things ") there is a great gulf fixed between 
them ; for good or evil they cannot go to one another. 
Now is our time for Christian influence, for '" tlio 



l8o APPENDIX. 

night Cometh, when no man can work." 4. Xothing is 
taught clearly concerning the effects of his torments 
upon Dives, and Jesus lets the curtain fall over his 
final state. The parable leaves him in suffering with- 
out possibility of help from Lazarus or Abraham. It 
does not come within the scope of the less(m which 
Jesus was intent upon impressing, to give any informa- 
tion as to whether or not a better mind might begin to 
be wrought in Dives tlirough his punitive bufferings, or 
whether the gulf, impassable to human pity, could 
ever be crossed by the divine mercy. The parable 
teaches directly nothing at all upon these points, and 
would not be inconsistent with any revelation which 
nught be made concerning the last judgment. "VTe 
must take the parable for the obvious truths which are 
its first mtention. 5. It teaches that character may be- 
come so determined at a lower stage of i-evelation as to 
render it morally certain that it would not change 
under a higher revelation (t. 31). 

n. The apostolic teaching of the descent into Hades. 
1st Peter, iii. 18-22, iv. 6. The weight of modem inter- 
pretation is on the side of taking these words to mean 
exactly what they seem to say. The traditional ortho- 
dox interpi^tation either leaves them unexplained, or 
refers them allegorically to the deepest sufferings in 
spirit of the Messiah, or resorts to various artificialities 
of treatment ; as Calvin regards Christ's preaching to 
the spu'its in prison as addressed to the souls of the 



APPENDIX. I8i 

pious dead of the Old Testament, and coolly justifies 
his grammatical liberty with the text by saying that 
the apostles often substituted one case for another! 
This passage, if taken to mean what the words say, 
yields the following teaching : 1. Christ really went to 
the place of departed spirits. 2. He went in his 
quickened spiritual life to the dead. The expression, 
quickened, or made alive in spirit, refers here as else- 
where to the life of the resurrection. In that form or 
mode of being in which after death he was made alive 
in the spirit, Christ went and preached to a class, at 
least, of the dead. 8. This advent of the crucified 
Christ in Hades was not a still deeper humiliation, but 
the first moment of his exaltation, the beginning of the 
glory of the resurrection. It was the Lord who had 
conquered death, and had begun to be made alive ac- 
cording to the power of the resurrection, who appeared 
in Hades. It is noticeable that in the mind of the 
Apostle the going to preach to the spirits in prison is 
directly associated with the resurrection, and ascent 
into heaven (v. 22), as though these were all parts of 
one and the same quickened life. The hour of Christ's 
advent among the dead is not determined by the text ; 
the general opinion has been that it took place before 
the resurrection (so Alford, in loco) ; but the older 
Lutheran theologians placed it " after his quickening iu 
the time between that and his going forth from tho 
tomb" (lluther, in ''Meyer's Com.'" inloco). Itevideutly 



1 82 APPENDIX, 

was before tiie moK^etAei lesarreetion cm the momiii^ 
of die third day; hut the implieatioii of the text is that 
it was after the qmekeniiig, <»r actual beginning of the 
lesmrecticHi. Our eoncepticm of it at diis point wiD be 
det^mined by oar general Tiew of the lesorreeticMi. If 
we ocmceiTe of the resorrectuHi as a sopeniatmal de- 
Tdc^^DQ^it of life^ a proeess of ^oiifieatioiiy not a 
catastn^hic change, then this Seriptaresy together wifli 
oth^Sy would indicate three chief epodis in the lesnr- 
leddonof Christ; Tiz^ his presence and woikingamoi^ 
the departed in the banning of Ae new Kfe made after 
the spirit ; his appearance <m earth to the diBeq>]e8 in 
a bod^, in which his p^sonal identity was reeognimble, 
but whidi as possessed of higher powezs was bj no 
means the ^ sdUEnsame bod[y '^ whidi died — flie period of 
^ wumtfegted^ resonecticm ; and, finallj, the vani^iing 
into in¥isibility, the ocmdoirion and perfedting of the 
lesDrredion in the asoenskm and g^kHification of the 
Lord. The epiritsinpris(mniajbe,aoo(»din^hr,in the 
begfaming or first 0U of the resorreetion-Jife, haTing 
the pledge of ite final completkm in the ^orified hn- 
manitj of Him who is die fiist fmits of die resanedtian. 
4w Christ in the first mcMn^its of his quickened life 
wrait to Hades to preadi the Go^d. Anjodier int^- 
pr^tatkm of diis word, as flie idea that it was a preach- 
ing of ocmd^nnation, is, as Hnther remarioB^ "a wholty 
azbitruy snppodtion." As tiie rising £ede»ner and 
Lord, Ckrijt eT2tere-3 rlie regicm of dc^paited fiparit^ In 



APPENDIX, 183 

the fresh, opening power of the resurrection and the 
life he preached to the dead. To imagine that he 
went there in the new-born joy of his triumph over 
death to tantalize hopeless spirits by announcing glad 
tidings which could do them no good, would be to deny 
the very spirit of Christ, and to contradict the love of 
God which he had just shown upon the cross. 5. We 
rightly infer that this preaching the Gospel among the 
dead by the rising Lord, was the completion of his 
prophetic office, being necessary to the universality of 
his gospel, and the absoluteness of his work of redemp- 
tion. 6. The mention of a particidar class of the dead 
may have been suggested by the figure of baptism ui 
the context ; but these departed spirits certainly could 
not have been selected by Christ to receive his message 
on account of any pre-eminence in piety or faith. On 
the contrary, it appears that they were spirits of men 
who had lived in one of the worst ages of human liis- 
tory ; that they had been disobedient, or unbelievers ; 
and the expression "in prison" would seem to indicate 
that they were not in paradise, or partakers of the freest 
spiritual life of Hades. Inferences from obscure Scrip- 
tures should be put forward with great hesitancy ; but 
if any inference be permissible from these cir- 
cumstances, instead of saying with Calvin that these 
were spirits of the ''pious dead," we should be war- 
ranted rather in surmising that they represented the 
lowest and most sunken of the dead before Christ's 



1 84 APPENDIX. 

coming ; and that as he sent his disciples into the high- 
ways and hedges to invite the blind and lame to the 
wedding-supper of the Lamb, so he descended himself 
to the very bottom of Hades with his gospel. Thus 
the universality of his preaching would enable him to 
become at last the judge both of the quick and the 
dead. From 1st Peter iv. 6, Huther (in Meyer) con- 
cludes that by the dead are there meant '' all whom 
Christ at his coming shall find as dead." "It is said 
that to all — irrespective of when or how — who are dead 
at the time of the judgment, the Gospel shall have 
been preached." 7. Nothing is said or implied concern- 
ing the effect of Christ's preaching among the dead. 

in. To these passages relative to the intermediate 
life should be added those expressions which indicate 
that the Apostles looked forward, not so much to the 
hour of death, as to the last great day, the final coming 
of Christ, for the end and confirmation of their faith. 
PhU. i. 6. 1st Peter v. 4. 2d Tim. i. 12, iv. 8. 1st Thes. 
iv. 13-17. Col. iii. 4. 1st John iii. 2. 

lY. Besides these direct teachings and suggestions 
of the ]^ew Testament, there are other passages which 
throw indirect light upon this subject, or themselves 
receive light from the Scriptures already considered: 
e,g,^ Eev. vi. 9-11 ; Jn. xiv. 3 — an intimation that the 
risen Lord will stiU have a work of preparation 
to do for his disciples. Mark xvi. 15, 16 ; 1st Tim. ii. 
4-6 ; Luke xix. 10 ; 1st John ii. 2 — assertions of the 



APPENDIX. 



185 



universality of the preaching of the Gospel. Luke 
vii. 11-15 — prolongation upon earth of probation after 
death had ensued, which could not be if at death the 
final judgment takes place. Matt. -12. 32 — implication, 
perhaps, of forgiveness for other sins than that against 
the Holy Ghost in the world to come. 1st Cor. xv. 29 ; 
Eev. XX. 13-14. 

Such are the Biblical elements of the doctrine of the 
intermediate life, and they ought not to be quietly 
ignored by orthodox theology, or left unadjusted to our 
whole teaching concerning the last things. If it be 
said that there is danger that the consideration of these 
obscure passages might lead individuals to whom the 
Gospel is now preached to cherish fallacious hopes of a 
second probation after death, it is also true that the 
failure to take into account these hints and possibilities 
of Scripture may involve for us the righteousness of the 
government of God " in great difficulty, and betray us 
into an un-Scriptural dogmatism with regard to God's 
dealing with those who die without the Gospel. Tlie 
only really dangerous thing is error — to go beyond, or 
to fall short of, the truth of revelation. Romanism in 
Luther's day had gone far beyond it ; but that is no 
reason why Protestantism should now fall sliort of it. 

This whole subject of the intermediate life, as was in- 
timated above (p. 182 ), needs furtlier to be thought out 
in connection with improved modern conceptions of tlie 
resurrection. If we regard the resurrection as a process 



1 86 APPENDIX, 

of spiritual embodiment, beginning at the death of the 
individual, but dependent for its full completion and 
manifestation upon the conclusion of this whole world- 
economy ; then it will be easier to harmonize in one 
consistent idea those Scriptures which imply that the 
resurrection is " a present and continuous reality," 
wrought through Christ's present power, and those pas- 
sages in which it is regarded as a still future event. 
The successive epochs in Christ's rising from the dead 
into the glory of the heavens become thus typical and 
light-giving. It is a possible suggestion that, as Jesus' 
resurrection was manifested for our sakes (visibility not 
being a constant, or necessary part of it), so the first 
resurrection. Rev. xx. 5, may be likewise some excep- 
tional manifestation of the power of the resurrection in 
the appearance of saints fitted and chosen for some 
special ministery, who, nevertheless, must wait with 
all the dead, both the great and small (Ibid., 11-12), for 
the last great day to attain in the new heavens and the 
new earth their full and final perfection. 

I have elsewhere indicated my views upon the process 
of the resurrection (" Old Faiths in JSTev/ Light," chap, 
viii.) ; but while a discussion of the better form in 
which this blessed hope may be conceived did not fall 
within the immediate scope of these sermons, I would 
call attention here to the importance of considering it 
in close connection with the doctrine of the inter- 
mediate life. This seems to me to be the missing link 



APPENDIX, 187 

in Dr. Whiton's recent book upon the " Gospel of the 
Resurrection." While bringing out forcibly the Scrip- 
tural testimony to a present and continuous resurrec- 
tion. Dr. Whiton seems to me to fail to grasp the full 
doctrine of the Bible, because he misses this idea of a 
resurrection begun, indeed, at death, and begun according 
to spiritual law, but dependent for its completion upon 
the connection of the individual with the whole creation 
and its glorification in Christ. (Rom. viii. 19-23.) The 
individual neither in this world, nor the world to come, 
can be made perfect alone. The fruition of the hope 
of the resurrection-life is conditioned upon the consum- 
mation of all things. The resurrection is not merely a 
development according to the spirit from within, as 
Dr. "Whiton rightly holds, but also a development con- 
ditioned upon great cosmic forces. (See Dorner, Opus 
cit., § 958.) 

This idea would relieve Dr. Whiton's argument of no 
little strain in the exegesis of those Scriptures which 
lead hope forward to the second coming of Christ, or 
final form of His presence, and the regeneration of all 
things. It should never be forgotten that in tlio 
Biblical philosophy of salvation the life of the in- 
dividual is bound up with the life of the whole, and 
reaches its fulness and completion only in the liberty 
for which the whole creation waits. 



APPENDIX, 



DiscouESE V. — ^NoTE 9, p. 128. 

The belief of the primitive Church respecting prayers 
for the dead has recently been collated and carefully 
examined by Canon Luckock in his book, "After 
Death." " The conclusion/' he writes, " from a full 
consideration of the foregoing arguments is, that the 
practice of praying for the faithful dead was universally 
adopted in primitive times ; and though, as we have 
seen, for wise reasons it was allowed to drop almost 
entirely out of our public worship, yet such a state of 
things cannot possibly be regarded as permanent " (p. 
252). Referring to the mediaeval abuse of this primi- 
tive custom which led to its abandonment in the Re- 
formation, he says : " We may well believe that in the 
temporary obscuration of the primitive practice, and 
the almost complete withdrawal of what is confessedly 
a most consolatory doctrine, we can see a distinct sign 
of a punitive purpose, and a visitation upon this and 
preceding generations for other men's sins " (p. 245). 
It is certainly a fair question whether in a deep con- 
sciousness of the oneness of Christ's kingdom in this 
world and the world to come, we might not now safely 
avail ourselves in public worship, as well as in private 
devotion, of such expressions with regard to the dead 
as are to be found in the epitaphs in the Catacombs, 
and in the ancient liturgies of the church. So St. Paul 



APPENDIX. 189 

expressed out of a full heart his wish that the Lord 
might grant to Onesiphorus to find mercy in that day. 
2d Tim. i. 18. 



DiscouESE v.— Note 10, p. 137. 

While I have not cared to burden these pages with 
citations from the extensive modern literature upon 
these subjects, I would acknowledge my sense of the 
great value of Prof. Corner's grand contribution to 
theology in his " Glaubenslehre," the last volume of 
which, containing his discussion of eschatology, has 
come to hand since these discourses were prepared. 
He puts forward the element of freedom as the reason 
for dogmatic uncertainty in our judgment of the final 
state of all men (2d Bd. §. 968). His whole discus- 
sion of these themes I would commend to the attention 
of theologians of our own churches as an example of 
the calm, catholic tone and temper which is greatly 
needed in the consideration of these diflBcult questions 
upon which Revelation is fragmentary, and where too 
confident judgment may easily betray us into untruth- 
fulness to the heart of faith. 



Old Faiths in New Light 

BY 

NEWMAN SMYTH, 

Author of ** The Religious Feeling,^'* 



One Volume, 12mo, cloth, - - - $1.50. 



This work aims to meet a growing need by gathering materials of 
faith which have been quarried by many specialists in their own depart- 
ments of Biblical study and scientific research, and by endeavoring to 
put these results of recent scholarship together according to one leading 
idea in a modern construction of old faith. Mr. Smyth's book is remark- 
able no less for its learning and wide acquaintance with prevailing modes 
of thought, than for its fairness and judicial spirit. 



CRITICAL NOTICES, 



"The author is logical and therefore clear. He also is master of a singularly 
attractive literary style. Fe^y• writers, whose books come under our eye, succeed in 
treating metaphysical and philosophical themes in a manner at once so forcible and so 
interesting. We speak strongly about this book, because we think it exxeptionally 
valuable. It is just such a book as ought to be in the hands of all intelligent men and 
women who have received an education sufficient to enable them to read intelligently 
about such subjects as are discussed herein, and the number of such persons is very 
much larger than some people think." — Congregationalist. 

'' We have before had occasion to notice the force and elegance of this writer, and 
bi> new book shows scholarship even more advanced. * * * When we say, with 
some knowledge of how much is undertaken by the saying, that there is probably no book 
of moderate compass which combines m greater degree clearness of style with profundity 
of subject and of reasoning, we fulfil simple duty to an author whose success is all the 
more marked and gratifying from the multitude of kindred attempts with which we have 
been flooded from all sorts of pens." — Presbyterian. 

"The book impresses us as clear, cogent and helpful, as vigorous in style as it is 
honest in purpose, and calculated to render valuable service in showing that religion and 
science are not antagonists but allies, and that both lead up toward the one God. We 
fancy that a good many readers of this volume will entertain toward the author a feeling 
of sincere personal gratitude." — Boston Journal. 

" On the whole, we do not know of a book which may better be commended to 
thoughtful persons whose minds have been unsettled by objections of modern thoughL 
It will be found a wholesome work for every minister in the land to read." 

— Kxaviiner and Chronicle. 

" It is a long time since we have met with an abler or fresher theological treatise 
than Old Faiths in Neiv Light., by Newman Smyth, an author who in his work on 
"The Religious Feeling" has already shown ability as an cxpoumler of Christian 
doctrine. " — Independent, 



*^*For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid., upon receipt of priie, 

CHART, ES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 

Nos. 743 AND 745 Broadway, New York 



THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

By Rev. NEWMAN SMYTH. 

One Volume, 12ino, cloth, ...... $1.25. 

In this volume Mr. Smyth has it for his object to formulate the relig- 
ious feeling as a capacity of the human mind, and to vindicate its claims 
:o authority. He sets before himself at the outset the task of convicting 
sceptical philosophy out of its own mouth. The work is thoroughly logical, 
and displays a familiarity with the most recent German thought which is 
rarely to be found. 

CRITICAL NOTICES. 

"The argument in its clearness, force and illustrations, has never, to our knowledge, 
been better stated. Mr. Smyth has brought to his work a clear, analytical mind, an 
extensive knowledge of German philosophical thought, and an intellectual familiarity 
with the later English schools. He does his own thinking, and writes with perspicuity 
and vigor." — The Advance. 

"We welcome this volume as a valuable contribution to that type of thought in the 
vindication of theism which is specially demanded at the present time. The discussion 
throughout evinces much reading and vigorous thought, and is conducted with marked 
candor and ability." — Nenu Englander. 

" The argument contained in these pages is eminently satisfactory. It is one of the 
best answers to Darwin and his followers we have ever met with." — The Churchman, 



rp-pq — pp^ 

Orthodox Theology of To-Day. 

By Rev. NEWMAN SMYTH, D.D. 

One Volume, 12xno, - . . - . $1.25. 

The object of this little volume is to answer certain objections which 
have been urged against evangelical teaching, and it is sent forth "for 
the purpose of helping among men the removal of some common diffi- 
culties in the way of the coming of a better day of faith." 

CRITICAJL NOTICES. 

*' That pleasing vigor of thought and that frequent rare beauty cf language . . . 
are conspicious excellencies of these sermons, with most of whose utterances we can hav% 
strong sympathy." — The Congregationalisi. 

"His latest book, The Orthodox Theology of To Day ^ has all the good qualities so 
abundantly manifested in his volumes The Religious Feeling and Old Faiths in Ne7u 
I,ight. But it is a stronger and broader book than either." — N. V. Christian 
Adiiocate. 

'" He puts things differently from the professed conservators of Orthodoxy, and he has 
much sympathy with honest doubters; but he keeps his reader under the powerful in- 
fluence of Evangelical conceptions of God, Christ, redemption and retribution. No man 
can learn from his pages to think lightly of sin, or to make little of religious truth."— 
Phila^ Sunday School Times. 

*^* For sale by all booksellers, or senf^ post-paid, upon receipt oj 
fricet by 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 

743 AND 745 Broadway, New York. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2006 

PreservationTechnologie! 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIC 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



